[ 2016-11-22 ]

Political gimmicks won’t affect outcome of Dec. polls — Akufo-Addo
The presidential candidate of the New Patriotic
Party (NPP), Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, has said
the last-minute political gimmicks being employed
by President John Dramani Mahama and his National
Democratic Congress (NDC) administration will not
affect the outcome of the December 7 polls.

He said the President had categorically stated
that nothing would ever change his decision not to
pay the allowances of nursing training school
students but in a dramatic reversal, just a few
weeks to the election, he had started paying
them.

“With a couple of weeks to the election, he has
gone to pay some allowances at Korle Bu. All these
are politics of lies. This is cheap, cheap
politics,” he said.

Restoration of allowances
Nana Akufo-Addo said he had maintained time and
again that given the nod he would restore and
fully pay all the allowances for nursing training
and teacher training students that had been
scrapped by President Mahama and the NDC.

Addressing a large gathering of politically
enchanted people at Suhum in the Easter Region, he
said “the free senior high school (SHS) policy
is coming into being,” attracting wild cheers
from the crowd.

For that policy to succeed, he said, there was the
need to see to the welfare of teachers and
especially teacher-trainees, for that matter.
Promising a reactivation of adult education, he
said; “when we were growing up, there used to be
an adult literacy programme that has collapsed. I
am going to revamp that programme to ensure that
our adult population that could not have the
advantage of attending school can now do that.”

“We want to create knowledge for all our people.
We can progress as a nation when our people are
given the opportunity to build their knowledge
base in order to use such knowledge in furthering
the goal of national development,” he said.

Innovative policies
He reiterated the policy of the “$1 million for
every constituency” policy, saying that
allocations from the national kitty over the years
had not fully benefitted those at the grassroots
and that when he became president, the first
budget for next year would see the beginning of an
allocation of $1 million to every constituency
across the country.

“That amount is going to help in areas such as
electricity, town roads, sanitation and water, and
every year that amount would be made available to
each constituency,” he stressed.

He said the “one district, one factory”
programme would be the fulcrum of the
industrialisation policy of the NPP government
under which numerous employment avenues would be
created to deal with the high unemployment rate in
the country.

Nana Akufo-Addo described the next government of
the NPP under his leadership as the government for
cocoa farmers, saying “my dear cocoa farmers, if
you hear of the coming of the NPP, then you should
know that the government that has your welfare at
heart is the one coming”.

The various policies that buoyed the cocoa
industry under the Kufuor administration, he said,
would be brought back to revamp the industry and
make it the pride of the country once again.
Mahama’s broken promises
“These are not electoral promises. I will not
come and tell you something that I know I cannot
achieve. I will not stand before the people of
Ghana and tell them lies,” he added.

Source - Graphiconline

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