Chairperson of the Convention People’s Party (CPP), Akosua Frimpongmaa Sarpong, has called on government to implement ‘operation feed yourself’ to help revive the economy.
According to her, agriculture must be one of government’s primary focus in salvaging the economy. She revealed that the constant churning of numbers by government which portends a healthy economy do not reflect in the lives of Ghanaians.
Describing such figures as laughable, Akosua Sarpong explained that when these numbers are chanted in countries such as the US, “people’s lives have improved”, a situation which is not so in the country, as“all these numbers don’t do much”.
“… With what I see happening in Ghana very soon, we should now go back to operation feed yourself immediately; we should focus on agriculture. Everything else we are going to do will not help us. We should leave this macroeconomic decision making with the IMF, now that we’ve gone to the IMF because they help with us controlling our expenditure. But we should immediately focus on the micro [and] sub-micro as well.”
Akosua Frimpongmaa Sarpong
The CPP Chairperson stated that the current state of the economy can’t be wholly attributed to the NPP government as it partly predates its governance. She emphasized that it will be prudent for Ghanaians to “focus on how we get Ghana to work because these people are not going to get us to work”.
To address the challenge, Akosua Sarpong expressed the need for government to invest the right energy and resources into agriculture. She urged government not to talk about planting for food and jobs but about ‘operation feed yourself’.
“So, for me, I really don’t think these people have the solution. … if you look at the debt, how much we owe, it’s scary… What did the NDC do with the oil industry and energy? They were importing finished goods yet we had ore there. They took over from the NPP so we would have expected that they would have been processing the ore here but we didn’t. The factories that collapsed are still not functional.”
Akosua Frimpongmaa Sarpong
Assessment of NPP government
In providing her rating on the performance of the NPP government, the CPP Chairperson gave government “a 4 instead of maybe a 2 simply because they continued with the CPP policy of free SHS” education. She revealed that because her belief is in the education of the youth, there is the need for them to be given the opportunity to maximize their potential.
Nonetheless, Akosua Sarpong expressed her disappointment in the banking sector clean-up initiated by government. She explained that the move has been detrimental to the country as a whole.
“From day one, I knew they had messed up on the decision they did with the banks. I just didn’t believe it. You could see that somebody was going after somebody and they don’t think and in the process, I can’t believe the amount of money that they put into cleaning up the sector. It’s not about clean-up, they messed up…”
Akosua Frimpongmaa Sarpong
Akosua Sarpong concerted that despite some challenges within the sector then, there was a “simpler way” to handle it. She expressed that government could have resorted to consulting experts within the banking sector to find the best solution in addressing the challenges.
“It was necessary to support the banking sector [but] how you do it makes the difference… In the process, they took several other decisions they shouldn’t have taken especially the microfinance. Why didn’t they support the microfinance people with funding because most of them were private sector institutions?…”
Akosua Frimpongmaa Sarpong
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