Bawumia lampooned for his ‘NDC Akonfem Socialism’ comments
The running mate of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) 2012 presidential ticket, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia has come under a barrage of criticisms for daring to turn the inaugural lecture intended to honour the memory of the late Vice President, Alhaji Aliu Mahama, into a political points scoring venture.
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Alhaji Harruna Attah Mr. Kwadwo Twum Boafo and Dr Clement Apaak told Radio Gold on Thursday that Dr Bawumia should have known better than to use the solemn occasion to seek to enhance his own political fortunes.
Harruna Attah, a member of the Publicity Committee of the Aliu Mahama first anniversary celebrations, has already issued a statement dissociating himself from the comments by Dr. Bawumia, saying Dr Bawumia “not only deviated from the topic he was given but exploited the platform to indulge in an unwarranted partisan political point scoring exercise and by so doing, totally desecrated the memory of the man the lecture was supposed to ennoble.”
While explaining his position on Radio Gold, Harruna Attah said Dr Bawumia’s conduct was not in good taste, and the forum was not one for venting whatever political thesis he had propounded to say that all other governments were wrong and that only his government was right.
“It was a memorial lecture about a third person, please, and it was the inaugural lecture and the theme was targeted, as I’m saying, at the youth - why we need a disciplined youth to move our country forward and the overriding theme was ‘do the right thing’. So why were they ignored and then thesis on economic mismanagement since independence then becomes the issue and gives it a partisan slant?”
“We were not talking of Alhaji Aliu Mahama as NPP, we were talking of Alhaji Aliu Mahama as a former Vice President of the Republic of Ghana and then as a person we knew, many people knew and worked with …, if it was just Aliu Mahama as an NPP man then the NPP could have just organized something at the party headquarters and left it there, but this was lifted into a national event, and that’s how come the President could even send a representative, that’s how come people like the Chief Imam could send a representative, the Christian Council… so it was way above a partisan political thing,” lamented Harruna Attah.
Dr Apaak, who represented President John Mahama at the lecture, recounted how all other speakers at the forum including ex-President J.A. Kufuor had extolled the virtues, values and contributions of the late Aliu Mahama – his statesmanship, his steadfastness and endearing warmth across political partisanship as well as his legacy as a nationalist, only for Bawumia to mount the podium and do Aliu Mahama’s memory a great disservice.
“To say the least, it was very shocking and by the time he finished, he had done the legacy of the late Vice President a great disservice because that was not the import, as far as I am concerned, of what the event was supposed to be about.”
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Not only was Dr Apaak disappointed at the level of indiscipline put up by Dr Bawumia, he said the whole plan, if it was to embarrass President Mahama should he have attended the memorial lecture, failed badly.
On Dr Bawumia’s poor rating of the economy under the ruling National Democratic Congress, Dr Apaak said there were many claims by Dr Bawumia that needed to be questioned and scrutinized for their factual inaccuracies. In any case, he said Dr Bawumia may have made the claims to reinstate himself as a viable candidate within the contestations in the NPP.
For the Executive Director of the Ghana Free Zones Board, Kwadwo Twum Boafo, the late Aliu Mahama, “a very, very decent person,” deserved better than Bawumia chose to give him.
“And I don’t think that if he were alive today, he would have been very happy with what he heard from Dr. Bawumia because, first of all, his life-long crusade was against indiscipline. Right off the hook, Dr Bawumia showed how indisciplined he himself was by going off script because what he was supposed to come and do was to celebrate the life of Alhaji Aliu and he ended up deciding to use it as a bully pulpit to insult the government…
“But Dr Bawumia should tell us that when he was Deputy Governor of the Bank of Ghana during the Kufuor administration, what was his claim to fame. What is it that we remember about Dr Bawumia and I would tell you – he went to redenominate the currency of this country and after spending millions of dollars changing the paper with which we use to pay bills in this country, our inflation rate moved up by 8 per cent immediately? Immediately they finished that useless exercise our inflation rate went up by 8 percent and that is fiscal discipline that is the kind of discipline Dr Bawumia was hoping that he was going to use to be Vice President of this country?
“In any case why do they choose Oda, to go and burn the old currency? Why do they choose Oda and what were they doing with the old currency when they got there? They should come and tell us and stop disturbing our ears with apparently nothing,” he said. Read Dr Bawumia's speech.