Rallying Call

The more you see of him, the more Nana Akufo-Addo looks the part. He is charismatic; he speaks eloquently; and most importantly, he is saying the right things. Whilst local media outlets portray Ghana as being politically polarized – which is indeed the case – the growing support for Akufo-Addo leaves little doubt that he will be enshrined as the new President of the Republic come December.

Like all politicians, Akufo-Addo is making plenty of promises, among the most interesting of which is the idea that the revenues generated from newly-discovered oil, projected to be in the tens of millions, would be used to bridge the development gap between the south of the country and the north, should he be elected. This certainly bodes well for the pockets of impoverished in the likes of Tamale, Bolgatanga and Wa, the capitals of the Northern, Upper East and Upper West Regions – Ghana’s poorest areas. His speeches on the issue have been almost convincing. The $15billion to be derived from the oil proceeds in the first five years of the crude oil export, he explained adamantly, would be used in the development of the country and not to line his pocket or that of members of his government. “I would put one billion dollars into the Northern Development Fund as seed capital to cater for the development of roads, construction of small scale dams and harvesting of rain water to modernize agriculture,” he said.

This, indeed, is desperately needed; but Mr Akufo-Addo’s virtual denial of the way the present NPP regime has ignored the development needs of the north makes you wonder about how genuine these speeches are. Many northerners still see the NPP as a ‘Southern Party’ which has focused strictly on developing areas of the Ashanti, Eastern, Central, and Greater Accra Regions. And they argue with good reason: under the watch of the incumbent, the north has attracted only 2% of the country’s development projects, and virtually none of the President’s Special Initiatives. But to deny the reality of what has amounted to – either intentionally or unintentionally – a ‘development bias’ in Ghana is denial that there is a problem altogether. He hailed Tamale, the capital of the Northern Region, as the most beautiful in the country. There is little arguing here about the accuracy of this statement but claims that ‘It [Tamale] was not like that seven and half years ago’, in reference to the NPP’s arrival, however, are delusional: the city is still scarred with rampant poverty, and has little in the way of income-generating activities. His response to remarks about the ‘development bias’ has been that ‘Development projects under the NPP were shared equitably, its programmes, policies and interventions have national character, these include National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), school feeding programme and capitation grant that had benefited all Ghanaians’.

The pledge to develop the north, as well as ensure that public universities are in each of Ghana’s regions, were the rallying calls of the incumbent’s election campaign, in 2000; neither has happened. The campaign of Mr Akufo-Addo is effectively the same thing. But whilst he sounds more convincing in his speeches on tackling these issues, his repeated denial about the failure of his party to deliver on several fronts raises questions about the genuineness of many of his promises. For the sake of Ghana’s poor, let us hope that, should this charismatic and eloquent politician be the country’s next president, he delivers.