Completed projects are the thing!

They were in power for 8 years, enough time to have started and completed the Anloga Shopping Center and a legion of other projects. So it is rather pathetic for the operatives of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) to suppose that President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo would facilely cede credit for a project that they clearly lacked either the zeal or will to complete to them. You are not going to reap where you haven’t sown, buddy!

(See “ ‘I’m Not Stealing NDC Policies, I’m [Only] Completing Ghanaian Projects’” Classfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 7/10/18).

Accusing Nana Akufo-Addo of “stealing” NDC’s policies is an abject nonstarter. The fact of the matter is that infrastructure development is as New Patriotic Party as it is National Democratic Congress or any other party, for that matter.

The reality on the ground, of course, is something totally different. And it is that the New Patriotic Party has an enviable track-record on infrastructure development that the leaders of the National Democratic Congress can only dream about or shamelessly plagiarize, such as the Savannah Accelerated Development Authority (SADA) which was lifted hook, line and sinker from the generously creative political playbook of Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo in the runup to the 2012 general election. But guess what happened? Because progressive thinking and a comprehensive national development agenda was never among the topmost priorities of the Mahama-led regime of the National Democratic Congress, SADA was criminally and scandalously botched.

Completing the Anloga Shopping Center project was definitely the right thing to do, contrary to the counsel that Dr. Tony Aidoo, as Director of Monitoring and Evaluation at the Presidency, once gave the late President John Evans Atta-Mills. Yes, completing the Anloga Shopping Center was the right thing to do, if only because this project was fully underwritten by the Ghanaian taxpayer’s money, and not from the wallets of any individual NDC leaders. Which is why Nana Akufo-Addo was right on the money when the President aptly riposted that he was simply about the sacred business of “completing Ghanaian projects.” I also think it is rather infantile and risible for any of the leaders of the National Democratic Congress to speciously lay claim to having originated the idea of building shopping centers in either Anloga or around the country as a whole.

The NDC leaders could just as well lay claim to having invented and/or introduced oxygen or the very air that we breathe into the universe. I also don’t understand why anybody would want to be given credit for a project or projects that they were either too lazy or too greedy to complete. If the NDC leaders want to be given credit for projects that they initiated, then, of course, they also need to learn how to complete such projects on schedule or within their mandated term in office, and not mischievously expect the NPP leaders to complete their purported projects for them. Maybe somebody also ought to remind these sore losers of the following proverb: “A bird in hand is worth a million in the sky, the bush or abroad.”

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By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

English Department, SUNY-Nassau

Garden City, New York

E-mail: [email protected]