According to the party, the scheme had already been fashioned out by previous governments.“What the NPP is doing now is to roll it out,” the APC stated.

Press confab on budget

At a press conference in Accra last Wednesday, the founder and leader of the APC, Mr Hassan Ayariga, said it would be appropriate for the NPP to give some credit to the previous governments for the great work they did, but as usual the NPP was taking credit for work it did not do.

What is now surprising, is that “after President Akufo-Addo got the first card, the country must now wait till next year (July) to start getting their cards”.

Mr Ayariga was sharing the party’s perspective on the 2018 budget statement read in Parliament by the Finance Minister, Mr Ken Ofori-Atta.

Much ado about nothing

Criticising the 2018 budget, Mr Ayariga described the budget as much ado about nothing.

On the Free Senior High School (SHS) policy, Mr Ayariga said the policy was an embarrassment and disappointment to students and parents.

“Do you see the disappointment in the eyes of parents whose wards met the entry requirement but could not be placed because government was trying to control the number of admissions as a result of cost,” he argued.

He said even though the policy was a laudable one, because the government did not have time to think through it carefully and come out with a blueprint to guide stakeholders, it was encountering challenges that were threatening its sustainability and ought to be scrapped to save the government the scarce resources that were being wasted on the programme.

He stressed that the Free SHS Policy, as it was currently being implemented, was an embarrassment and a disappointment to students and parents whose daughters were getting pregnant because they lived alone without supervision as there were inadequate dormitories to accommodate them for which reason they had to rent private accommodation.

That, according to Mr Ayariga, made them vulnerable to unscrupulous men.

Nurse and teacher-trainee allowance

On the nurse and teacher trainee allowances, Mr Ayariga said the government had fooled Ghanaians to believe it had restored those allowances but the nurses claimed the allowances did not come in October.

He noted that the NPP had reneged on restoring the allowance and opted to implement a loan scheme for the teachers which was already in operation.

110 appointments

Mr Ayariga said the NPP believed that the appointment of 110 ministers would solve the country’s problem and that was why ‘’we have more than six ministers in one ministry.’’

Strangely, he said in the NPP’s 10 months in office, its government had borrowed several millions of dollars but could not point to any tangible achievement.

Job creation

On job creation, Mr Ayariga said the NPP government in the 2018 budget had cut down on spending and what that meant was the country had no working capital.

He noted that if the government was controlling fiscal deficits by reducing their budget spending, it could result in non-payment of contractors which was likely to halt all government projects, as well as companies cutting down on their budgets and laying off workers.