Nana Addo Hits Back

Posted: Daily Guide |Thursday, 29 April 2010

A KNEE-JERK reaction put out by the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) propaganda machinery to smother some facts and figures stated by the 2008 Presidential Candidate of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, about the economy of Ghana, has caught fire.

Days after Nana Addo launched his 2010 Presidential bid, at which he indicated that 39.5percent Ghanaians lived below the poverty line in 1999, a year before the NDC (1) lost power to the NPP, the NDC, through its propaganda machinery led by party Propaganda Secretary, Richard Quashigah, came out to deny Nana Addo’s claim, saying he was being insincere with the facts about the NDCs performance in office.

This, according to the NDC, was because the figures put out by the then Government Statistician, Dr. Kweku A. Twum-Baah, in the year 2000, gave the percentage of Ghanaians living below the poverty line as 28% based on the Ghana Living Standard Survey Three (GLSS 3).

When the party’s Propaganda Secretary was challenged with confirmation of the facts as presented by Nana Akufo-Addo on Citi FM’s Eye Witness News ,Tuesday evening, he could not defend the party’s position, except to beat a hasty retreat that he was going to ‘cross-check’ the very facts he used to accuse Nana Akufo-Addo of being insincere.

In a quick and swift rebuttal, Nana Addo has noted with emphasis that it would be extremely disingenuous on the part of the NDC as a party and a government, to misrepresent the statistics as reported by the then Acting Government Statistician.

A statement issued by Mustapha Hamid, head of Nana Addo’s communications team, indicated that “Dr Twum-Baah on Monday, October 30, 2000, launched ‘The Poverty Report’, which was published together with the fourth in the series of Ghana Living Standards Survey (GLSS4). What he stated correctly, without using the previous GLSS3 of 1992 as baseline, was that ‘the incidence of poverty at the upper line declined from 51.7 percent in 1991-1992, to 39.5 percent in 1998-1999’.”

In some apparent state of statistical discomfiture and confusion, the statement said Richard Quashigah explained that the GLSS3 report put the number of people in Ghana living under the poverty line at 28 percent.

Nana Addo therefore noted that “the NDC, which was in office at the time, could not have been ignorant of the fact that the third Ghana Living Standards Survey (GLSS3) referred to the period September 1991 – September 1992, and the report was published in March 1995, when Daasebre Dr Oti Boateng was Government Statistician and GLSS Project Co-ordinator.”

That report, as pointed by Nana Addo, the statement said, put the percentage number of Ghanaians living below the poverty line of $1 per day at 51.7 percent; stating that “the NDC should be content with taking credit for reducing the percentage from 51.7 percent to 39.5 percent in 1999 and stop making false claims of 28percent.”

“That 28 percent incidence of poverty claim for 1999, is typical of a party that is not ashamed of making propaganda claims out of important statistics, such as the previous claim of creating 1.6 million new phantom jobs since January 2009,” stated Nana Addo.

In this regard, Mustapha Hamid said the NDC statement should have rather accused Nana Addo of being too modest in trumpeting the unprecedented real increases that Ghanaian workers experienced in their purchasing power, under President J A Kufuor.

Instead, he noted that typical of their propaganda status, the NDC has issued a statement saying, “Besides it is mischievous and misleading on the part of Nana Addo to state that the number of Ghanaians currently living below the poverty line has increased by 500,000 persons, a figure he attributed to the World Bank.

This is untrue because the World Bank, which he sourced his information from, is yet to release any figures for 2009, more so for the year 2010.”

This, he said, was because, Nana Addo stated that “but, as a result of the economic policies adopted by President Mills and his government, the World Bank is now estimating that half a million more Ghanaians will fall below the poverty line by this year alone.”
He therefore noted that the statement by the NDC Propaganda Secretary, “Only goes to expose the weight of panic Nana Akufo-Addo is capable of sending across the nerve centre of the NDC.”