New Patriotic Party Presidential hopeful, Dr Owusu Afriyie Akoto, says the party requires radical approach in leadership for the 2024 general elections.
The immediate past Minister of Food and Agriculture told the Ghanaian Times that his six years’ experience as a minister, eight years’ experience as a ranking Member of Parliament for Food and Agriculture Affairs and his international experience at the UN related organisations, makes him stand tall in the competition.
He has therefore, appealed to the party faithfuls to vote for him at the special delegates conference as one of the five candidates for the presidential primaries, and crown him with resounding victory on November 4, to become the flagbearer, to lead the party to victory in December 2024.
Speaking in an exclusive interview in Accra on Tuesday ahead of the special delegate conference on August 26, he said “the party has long tradition stretching for over 70 years in state that cannot be relied upon to deliver the elections next year, if nothing is done about it.
It needs a radical shake, leadership is weak, financially the party is down and it is affecting the front line executives as their expectations of their welfare has been disappointed and with this low morale, I don’t think one can go into elections next year,” he said.
He said the party had the capacity to raise income for the party and promote the welfare of membership through its own corporate activities to generate the money and “not rely on government for any penny they would need.”
Re-echoing his vision for the country given the nod to lead the party to the general elections, Dr Akoto said “I see that agriculture is the only tool that can get us out of this International Monetary Fund (IMF) issues. We have been to IMF for 17 times in 66 years of the country’s Independence.”
“We rely on debt to promote our development and debt cannot promote development anywhere, it is your own boosters that can promote the country so this idea of borrowing money from external and domestic to fund social and infrastructure sectors is a mirage.
My solution is that agriculture has the capacity to generate us more than enough revenue both external and foreign exchange even to be able to fund the other sectors including industrialisation, health, education and infrastructure.
“We have the potential, we have been relying on cocoa for the past 130 years as our major experience revenue, there are more crops to bring more but they have been ignored, this is my vision for the party and the country,” he added.
He reiterated the significance of the Tree Crops Development Authority to the economy of Ghana that he had initiated as minister to develop six crops: cashew, oil palm, shea, coconut, mango and rubber to position Ghana to earn an estimated $16 billion in the next eight to 10 years.
Touching on the Planting for Food and Jobs, the NPP flagbearer hopeful said that the programme had been the most successful intervention of any government in the agriculture sector and had laid the foundation for farmers to know what was good for them to get more yields.
“In 2021 agriculture sector growth went up by 8.4 per cent and that has never happened like that before, we have expanded the sector to about 1.7 million farmers who have benefited from this,” he added.
BY ALHAJI SALIFU ABDULRAHAMAN
