Director of IT for the National Democratic Congress (NDC), Osei Kwame Griffith, has revealed that the Vice President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, is expected to tell Ghanaians how government plans to resolve the economic crisis in the country.
According to him, the happenings in the country has gotten beyond the point where “we say that it’s unfortunate”. He indicated that it’s surprising to have somebody in such a high office who would “resort to spewing out blatant untruths” anytime he gets the opportunity to do so.
“It’s gotten to a point where it begins to get offensive in a sense that we live in a country and a lot of people cannot afford even one decent meal a day. So, as the leader of the economic management team, the expectation was to tell us not necessarily how we even got here, but how we are going to get out of this mess.”
Osei Kwame Griffith
Mr Griffith noted that on listening to Dr Bawumia’s speech on the digitalization agenda, he picked up a few things from the Vice President statements. He highlighted that “before Dr Bawumia became the Vice-President of this country, there was mobile money interoperability” and the coming of his government has further enhanced it.
“So, when he says 90% of Ghanaian adults now have bank accounts, I think that is deceptive. Because when you say bank account and you define it as mobile money wallet or a bank account, then people will wonder. Did people just get mobile money wallets after the interoperability was enhanced? No. Mobile money operability has existed.”
Osei Kwame Griffith
Digitalization agenda was started by the NDC
The Director of IT for the NDC emphasized that the digitalization agenda was started under the government of the NDC, although some of the systems have currently been enhanced. He stated that it is wrong for Dr Bawumia to say that his “predecessors don’t understand digitalization”.
“If you give access to systems and applications credit to anyone at all in this country, you will give it to one person in this country and the pandemic. One is JDM, the person who made accessible a 1,000km of fibre from Accra all the way to Upper East so that people within the rural communities can also join in the digitalization agenda of the country and then of course, the pandemic also brought a lot of automated systems on board where people now resorted to zoom meetings. So, let us not make it look as if the predecessor did nothing.”
Osei Kwame Griffith
It will be recalled that on July 18, 2022, Vice President Dr Mahamudu Bawumia revealed that he is unfazed by naysayers who attempt to derail the significance of government’s vision to digitise the structures of the country. He indicated that when it comes to visionaries “who try to move our country to a different level, they are confronted with a mindset that only sees impossibility”.
Speaking at the launch of the National Electronic Pharmacy Platform, Dr Bawumia expressed that he is unmoved by the constant negativity.
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