The Member of Parliament (MP) for the Tamale North Constituency, Hon. Alhassan Suhuyini has slammed H.E. president Akuffo Addo’s government for rolling out policies without carefully thinking through how such policies should be implemented.
According to him, a careful examination of most of the policies rolled out by the Akufo-Addo led government, shows very attractive slogans but “clearly, no thinking goes into it”. He cited the fight against illegal mining (Galamsey), the $1 million for each District, IDIF, and the free SHS as some of such policies.
He made these comments whilst speaking on the PM Express on Tuesday night during a discussion on the State of the Nations address delivered by the President on Tuesday, January 5, 2021.
“If it [galamsey] was carefully thought through, the President wouldn’t be asking us to debate what he had already planned to ban and to deal with and put his presidency on the line if he fails. That was the admission that the thinking that went into it could have been better. And for me, it cuts across many policies. He launched the free SHS before a policy came about”.
Hon. Suhuyini
He expressed disappointment about the fact that the president did not give a progress report on some of the policies he rolled out in his first term of office. He noted that he was expecting the president to give an account of some of the things that he had done in his first term of office, for instance how the $1 million per constituency fared.
To him, if he was told that the $1million was just used to provide toilet facilities in his constituency, he will be angry since he expects the equivalence of that amount in the domestic currency to have done a lot for each constituency.
“But really, did the constituencies get $1 million in the last four years? No they didn’t”, the Tamale North MP added.
The Director of Advocacy and Policy Engagement at CDD-Ghana, Dr. Kojo Asante who also joined the discussions via Zoom pointed out that there is the need to find another way of fighting galamsey in the country. Because a look at the water bodies in areas where the mining activities go on, “you will notice that there is a disaster waiting to happen”.
He added that we may not feel the impacts now but a time will come when we may not get potable water to drink. He indicated that the fight against the galamsey was undermined by the president’s party people, citing the missing seized excavators as an example.
The Information Minister, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, also a panelist on the program who made his submissions via Zoom, disagreed with an earlier statement made by the Tamale North MP, about the president’s call for further debate on the fight against galamsey.
According to Mr. Nkrumah, the president’s statement was a rhetoric and that did not mean that he was calling for a conversation on whether galamsey should be allowed or not, but rather, he was “drawing attention to a deeper phenomenon because there are so many people who are internally and externally involved in the galamesey who end up fighting any government who desired to do a good job at it”.
Furthermore, Franklin Cudjoe, the Founding President and CEO of IMANI Centre for Policy and Education who joined the discussions via zoom, however, believes that the failure to allocate property rights to the mining concessions is the major challenge to the fight against the galamsey in the country.
According to him, there is the need to go back to the Lands Act and look at what aspects of the Act assures proper ownership of land rights. He believes that if the land belongs to individuals they will take proper care of it but once it belongs to the state it will not be handled well, a phenomenon that is referred to as the tragedy of the commons in resource economics.
