One of the major benefits of democracy is that it promotes strong competition among the political parties seeking the mandate to lead the people. This competition comes in the form of ideas or plans each party wants to adopt to transform the lives of the people.
In Ghana, the two leading political parties – the New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the National Democratic Congress (NDC) – have not been left out in this competition of ideas since the advent of the Fourth Republic Constitution. These ideas are normally put together in a form of a book, which they prefer to call manifestoes, for Ghanaians to read and know the plans they have for Mother Ghana.
However, if the people are to vote based on ideas and the plans these political parties have for the development of the country, then one would have expected that manifestoes containing these ideas would come out early for the people to make a fair and proper assessment of them, but this seldom happens in Ghana.
The political parties wait when the election is at the homestretch before releasing their manifestoes. This makes it very difficult for the voter to subject them to proper scrutiny before deciding on which party to vote for. Nevertheless, that has been the trend, which, to us, is very unfortunate.
As we are all aware, the 2020 presidential and parliamentary elections are just around the corner, and as we have already alluded to, the political parties have started coming out with the visions they have for the country. The opposition NDC seems to have adopted the strategy of releasing its ideas contained in the yet-to-be-launched manifesto in bits and pieces. During his recent interview with a private TV station, the flagbearer of the party, John Dramani Mahama, hinted that should Ghanaians vote for him, he will launch a $10 billion accelerated infrastructural plan, dubbed the Big Push, which, according to him, will drive jobs and the entrepreneurial agenda.
“We are looking at what I call the BIG PUSH, injecting some $10 billion to dualise our roads, complete the remainder of the 200 Community Day Senior High Schools, finish all the hospital projects that have been left abandoned, and construct bridges to open up the country,” he said. This idea sounds good on paper, but what the presidential candidate failed to tell Ghanaians is how and where he is going to mobilise this $10 billion to execute the projects he has envisaged.
As stated earlier, because manifestoes for the political parties are not released on time, it makes it very difficult for Ghanaians, including journalists, to make proper assessments of them. But this year, The Chronicle believes, will be different. We, as a media people, should not allow the parties to churn out ideas without telling us how they are going to implement them.
It is on the basis of this that The Chronicle is asking former President John Dramani Mahama to tell Ghanaians how his administration is going to raise the funds to execute his ideas. In a country where less than a million workers on government payroll consume more than half of our domestic revenue, leaving crumbs for the development of the country, one is wondering how this $10 billion is going to be raised. If Mahama’s eyes are on the oil revenue, it is already being used to finance the Free Senior High School, which he has promised to continue. In our view, unless there is an exponential growth of the economy, or borrowing from external sources and, therefore, piling up our debt profile, mobilising $10 billion is not going to be an easy task.
These are the reasons why we think Mahama must come out and tell how he would mobilise the money. Telling us the idea is not enough, the source of the money must also be known to Ghanaians.
The post Editorial : How is Mahama going to mobilise the $10bn? appeared first on The Chronicle Online.
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