Sammi Awuku: Amissah-Arthur had a 2020 campaign office to fight Mahama for NDC flagbearership

The national organiser of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Sammi Awuku, says that the former vice-president Paa Kwesi Bekoe Amissah-Arthur, before his sudden death, had set up a campaign office to run against his former boss, John Dramani Mahama, for the position of National Democratic Congress flagbearer and stand for the NDC in Election 2020.

Sammi Awuku made this known as he addressed a press conference by the NPP at the Alisa Hotel in Accra on Thursday 13 August 2020.

In his statement, Awuku quizzed: “What is the good work that Mahama wants Ghanaians to remember with nostalgia? What were the good old days?

Value for money

“Is it his decision to run to the IMF for a bailout because he could not manage the economy? Is it his decision to dish out inflated contracts without even knowing how to pay for them, leaving it for the NPP to come and settle the arrears?

“Is it his decision to build two flyovers (Kasoa and Kwame Nkrumah Circle) at a cost much higher than what NPP is using to build four bigger flyovers – Tema, Pokuase, Obetsebi-Lamptey and Tamale?

“What is this good record that John Mahama is using as a reference point to be voted for in December to come back to continue? Is it a record that was so good that his own vice-president, the woefully underutilised Kwesi Amissah-Arthur (according to Kwamena Ahwoi), was so eager to contest his former boss John Mahama for the 2020 NDC leadership position before his sad and sudden death?”

Infrastructure fixation

The NPP national organiser further noted: “The NPP has taken note of Candidate John Mahama’s campaign strategy, which is an agenda to compare the eight years of NDC (the Mills/Mahama and Mahama/Amissah-Arthur eight years) to the less than four years of NPP under Akufo-Addo and his most able vice-president, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia.

“Mahama has decided that for 2020, just like he did in 2016 and failed, he is once again going to use infrastructure as his biggest achievement to campaign on. This means that he is using everything – including contracts awarded under President Kufuor, like the many district hospitals up and down the country … executed under President John Atta Mills, and other contracts, like the University of Ghana Medical School, started under Mills and completed under Akufo-Addo – and claiming all of them as all his doing and his alone,” Awuku said.

“We have no problem with that because we know, and the evidence will show, that the NPP under Akufo-Addo has achieved more in providing infrastructure for communities up and down the country under just four years than John Mahama and his NDC did in eight years.

“We have the evidence and we shall be sharing it with the Ghanaian people very soon. And it won’t be in a green book,” the NPP organiser said.

The accidental president

Sammi Awuku further said that John Mahama had suffered from a pandemic of indecision during his presidency.

“It is evident from how he stumbled reluctantly into the vice-presidency, when his whole plan was to pursue a PhD course in South Africa, and how he became president accidentally. He should thank Haruna Iddrisu, Minority Leader, and Stan Dogbe, his own aide, who in John Mahama’s bedroom in late March 2008 begged him to accept the running mate offer.

“In fact, that day, Haruna Iddrisu is known to have torn into pieces an open letter that the MP for Bole – John Mahama – had written to the NDC leadership and was about to have published to say that he was not at all interested in becoming Professor Mills’s running mate.

“Ghanaians must blame the two men for stopping John Mahama from doing what he really wanted to do,” Awuku said.

Wilberforce Asare / Asaase Radio

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