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: graphic.com