Your 24-hour economy promise and new electricity tariff hike are at variance – IERPP fellow to Mahama

An associate of the Institute of Economic Research and Public Policy (IERPP) has said that the institute finds it difficult to marry President Mahama’s planned implementation of his promised 24-hour economy with the recent hikes in utility tariffs in general and electricity in particular.

P K Sarpong, a fellow at IERPP, writing on his Facebook wall, questions how the National Democratic Congress (NDC) government intends to roll out the 24-hour economy with a new electricity tariff increase of 14.75%.

“We need to remind President Mahama that he came to office promising to implement a wide range of policies and programmes to better the lives of Ghanaians,” Sarpong said. “One of the key promises was the implementation of the 24-hour economy.

“Contingent on the successful implementation of the 24-hour economic plan is not only an efficient power supply but also an affordable one. In fact, the national chairman of the NDC, Johnson Asiedu Nketiah, in the run-up to the 2024 election, was emphatic that electricity tariffs would be halved for entities that would register for the 24-hour economic plan.

“With a 14.75% hike in electricity tariffs, how can the programme be rolled out?” he quizzed.

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The decision to increase the price of electricity, he stressed, shows that President Mahama and the NDC leadership lied to Ghanaians, Sarpong argued.

“President Mahama pulled the wool over our eyes with his 24-hour economy pledge,” he wrote.

In an interview to clarify his post, Sarpong argued that President Mahama’s much-touted 24-economic model was nothing but an election-winning gimmick, because it lacked substance from day one.

“We all saw how difficult it would be for Mahama to implement his 24-hour economy. We had cause to state that it was more of an aspiration than a concrete policy. The people did not listen to us, but now look at where we are,” he said.

Sarpong said that the 24-hour economy, in its current state, is dead on arrival and that Ghanaians should not bank their hopes on its implementation because there does not seem to be a blueprint for its rollout.

“Mahama will implement a 24-hour economy. There is no policy or blueprint for its implementation. The ‘policy’ exists in the mind of the president. It is idealistic at best, since its implementation is difficult under the current circumstances. Ghanaians were clearly deceived,” he said.

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