Roads may be ‘eaten’, President John Dramani Mahama has told his critics.
The president made the submission when he appeared on Radio Savannah in the Northern Region Thursday July 14 on the last leg of his Accounting to the People tour, which has taken him through the entire country, as he revealed work done so far by government in terms of road construction.
But when asked for his response to criticisms by his political opponents that the construction of several kilometres of road would not yield food for hungry Ghanaians, Mr Mahama said: “Roads improve our incomes and so ultimately we eat roads. [This is] because roads bring the yams we eat, and so if I just say literally...the food we eat in our markets is brought to the market by the roads and so I don’t physically eat the road as an item, but the road facilitates the food that you eat and if the roads are better, then it means… we will be able to evacuate more foodstuffs to the market centres and that will affect inflation, it means that food inflation will come down, we will make food cheaper for our people.”
Mr Mahama added: “If we engineer the roads and the roads are better, we can evacuate more cocoa and then export the cocoa and make more income for our country. We can pay our workers better so, ultimately, those roads would have translated into better remunerations for you and so, for political purposes, people will say we don’t eat roads. We don’t eat hospitals but if you are sick, you will see the need for hospitals. You won’t eat the hospital but it will make you well. We don’t eat schools but education is the most important thing that one needs to come out into the world of work and so these social infrastructures, you can say we don’t eat them. But the point is, they make this country a better place and they will be responsible for propelling our country into an era of prosperity.”
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