The National Democratic Party (NDP) has bemoaned the current state of the nation with regards to the economy, the right of citizens to work, good health care and right to education.
A statement issued to the Ghana News Agency (GNA) by Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings, Leader of the NDP, said the State-of-the-Nation Address (SONA) delivered by President John Dramani Mahama, had exposed the ‘sorrows of the nation’ and called for Ghana to rise for change in the upcoming elections.
She noted that, while the SONA was expected to provide answers to Ghanaians, the address rather showed that the health of the economy was not guaranteed in light of the precarious household incomes, coupled with unemployment and collapsing businesses.
On the right to work, the statement noted: “by the emergence of desperate groupings for employment such as Association of Unemployed Graduates, this has become a luxury to say the least.”
Mrs Agyeman-Rawlings also lamented government’s lack of commitment to good health care, saying that, the inefficiencies of the National Health Insurance Scheme were due to lack of funding and not increased subscriptions.
“Good health care has not been accorded the due priority and that right has been odiously undermined. Lives continue to be snuffed out at a genocidal proportion due to the heinous deprivation of the people and the inability to afford due health care in emergencies, particularly for the most vulnerable in society,” she stated.
She further stated that the nation was still grappling with the constitutional imperative of free compulsory basic education, with many children roaming in deprived communities, adding that lack of transparency in infrastructural project costs and other areas were alarming.
She also criticised President Mahama’s declaration to intensify decentralisation within institutions, saying “in fact decentralisation presents itself in the constitution as the trunk governance to achieve participatory democracy and will not be open to the NDC government to want to operationalise it with its tendencies to run an obscure administration”.
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