Richard Ahiagbah, the Director of Communications of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), has bemoaned how external factors like the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russia invasion of Ukraine have impeded the government’s growth and development agenda.
He noted that it would be unfair to assess the government’s performance without taking such factors into consideration.
“If we are having a conversation between 2017 and 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic, no one will have predicted that we will someday find ourselves in such an economy, considering the growth trajectory we were on,” Mr Ahiagbah said.
However, he was hopeful that the government would revive the economy despite all the challenges because in the three years of the government’s first four-year term, the country was progressing, growing and developing but in the fourth year the economy started dipping due to external factors.
“In the three years of our first four-year term, we were growing, then in the fourth year, something happened, our situation can be likened to a student, who had impressive grades in the first three years, and then fell sick in the final year, which affected his punctuality, and ultimately his academic performance in the final year and would we say he was a bad student?”
“This is the exact situation we, the NPP, find ourselves in but people are prejudiced in having such a conversation so we need to compare our records with that of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) to make a fair judgment,” Mr Ahiagbah asserted and accused some policy analysts of not being completely transparent to the citizenry, but “picking and choosing the numbers or the parochial interests”.
He maintained that accounted for the negative perception most Ghanaians had about the government which was unfortunate because when the economy picked up in 2016, some of the policy analysts knew where the numbers were but they are silent on it.
According to him, even now, the government had posted first and second quarter growth, but nobody was willing to talk about it, all they did was political advocacy and went about saying everything about the economy was bad which was problematic.
