The Ghana Union Movement (GUM) Presidential Candidate, Christian Kwabena Andrews (Osofo Kyiriabosom) says, although Ghana’s debt stock has surged by GHC16.9 billion in the first quarter of 2020, it has little to show for it.
Ghana’s inability to industrialise its agriculture and bolster the manufacturing industry as well as over-reliance on foreign credit to support various sectors of the economy, he noted, continued to sink the country deep into indebtedness.
This excessive borrowing, he added, deprived citizens of economic and employment opportunity, access to quality health care, shelter, social security, potable drinking water, energy, accessible roads and other developmental infrastructure.
According to him, the two dominating political parties – the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC) – had both failed to transform the country although it was endowed with natural resources and labour.
In an interview with the Ghana News Agency in Accra, Rev Lenin BK Trotsky, Political Scientist for GUM, said the NPP and NDC had no excuse for their abysmal failure of the people of Ghana, but only that they lacked designs of homegrown policies to serve the populace.
Although there had been some attempts such as the Akufo-Addo’s flagship One District One Factory, one village one dam, and rearing for food and jobs, he said it was “failed promise…”
In his view, John Mahama coming back had nothing to offer the people because his records showed and that he failed woefully to fix unemployment issues, fight corruption and put the nation at great financial risk by borrowing excessively from the IMF.
In respect of the woeful performances of the two dominating political establishments, Mr Trotsky said if the electorate considered worthy of their votes, the GUM party would use homegrown policy to administer Ghana and provide opportunities for rapid economic takeoff.
The party also condemned the tribal division creeping into Ghana politics, saying people from different ethnic backgrounds fought side by side with Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah for the country to gain independence.
In GUM’s mini-manifesto, Osofo Kyiriabosom said the Movement was poised to build a society of people, where tribalism, corruption, nepotism and cronyism would be a thing of the past, advising “where there is division, there is strife and evil also thrives…”
He added that the question of who is a Ghanaian had already been provided for in the 1992 Constitution, but a true “Ghanaian is one who is greater in his soul than in his class, creed, political party or the section in which he lives.”
He said, “To be a Ghanaian, a man must have a Ghanaian soul and believe in the spiritual realities upon which Ghana rests and out of which Ghana was born.
“A Ghanaian was created to light mankind with those passions, which lift and not by the passions that separate and debase.
“Ghanaians improve the ideals of man and make them see finer things, causing them to get rid of the things that divide and establish things that unite.”
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