Former President John Dramani Mahama has said Ghanaians would have crucified him if he had caused even a fraction of the mess that he perceives the current government has created.
Speaking to KSM on Pan-Africa TV in an interview on Tuesday, 25 July 2023, Mr. Mahama pointed out that there is a deliberate propaganda strategy by the governing party to portray both the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the New Patriotic Party (NPP) as similar, aiming to deceive Ghanaians into supporting them in power.
“They [NPP] have created a crisis of confidence in the population in our democracy because now it’s easy for Ghanaians to think that politicians are liars; they’ll just lie for political power. If I did one-tenth of what they have done these last eight years, I’m sure that I would have been pilloried and crucified on a cross by now. There’s a bit of hypocrisy in it.”
“It’s NPP propaganda…they are in their mess, and they want to draw everybody else into the same mess,” the flagbearer of the NDC for the 2024 elections added.
“They [NPP] are happy to push that mantra and make it look like, ‘Oww, you’re better off staying with us because if the NDC comes, it will be the same.’ That is the psychology of the propaganda they are doing, It’s not the same.”
Mr Mahama said the NDC “has a track record: We have given more Ghanaians electricity than any party in this country. Rawlings started the national and rural electrification programmes which have brought Ghana to above 80 per cent of electricity coverage among the top 10 in Africa.”
“We started the digital revolution in this country. I was the Minister of Communication when we divided post and telecommunications and created Ghana Telecom and allowed Spacefon and all the mobile operators to come in. We started laying fibre optics in this country. We did the eastern corridor fibre optic.”
“We’ve given more Ghanaians water than any party in the history of this country. When Prof [John Evans Atta Mills] came into office, water coverage was 55 per cent; by the time I left office, water coverage was 72 per cent.”
“Seventy-two per cent of Ghanaians had access to good drinking water. We have built all the public universities in this country. NPP hasn’t built one public university. They are just good at renaming them with their party figures. And, so, somebody builds a university and you come and name it Dombo University, Tedam University, and so, don’t let them come to tell us we and they are the same. We are not the same. They should just wallow in their mess and leave us alone.”
