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The National Democratic Congress (NDC) parliamentary aspirant for Effutu in the Central Region, James Kofi Annan, has called on President Nana Addo-Dankwa Akufo-Addo to apologise to Ghanaians for riding on huge promises that he knew he was not going to fulfil to ascend the high office of the President.
He said it was also injustice for Ghanaians to have voted for the President instead of former President John Dramani Mahama.
“I look back into times and I listen to Nana Akufo-Addo’s State of the Nation Address (SONA), and I feel that we would have made a lot of progress and Ghanaians stood to have benefitted more if we had maintained John Mahama as President in 2017.
We would have done ourselves a good service if Nana Akufo-Addo did not become President at all,” he said.
Mr Annan said this while sharing his thoughts on President's Akufo-Addo's SONA to Parliament last Tuesday.
The Effutu NDC aspiring parliamentary candidate said the SONA was a constitutional mandate and the President delivering it was in order but he did not give the true state of the nation.
He said the President only highlighted areas that benefitted himself and his party to look good.
He said the President saying that the buck stopped with him and taking responsibility for everything that had happened was virtually and indirectly exonerating his Vice-President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, but at the same time applauding him (Bawumia) for championing digitalisation, smacked of hypocrisy and double standards.
Mr Annan noted that the failure of the government was a collective responsibility and that Dr Bawumia, could not absolve himself of blame.
The aspiring legislator for Effutu said former President John Dramani Mahama fixed the incessant power outages (known as “Dumsor") before he left office.
"For President Akufo-Addo to allude that he came to fix dumsor, is incorrect," he stated.
Touching on the YouStart programme, Mr Annan described it as a conduit to channel money to individuals who did not deserve it.
He said the money invested into the YouStart programme could have been given to the universities to run short courses on entrepreneurship and business management so that anyone who has interest in becoming an entrepreneur could go there and access those courses.
He said in spite of the introduction of the YouStart programme about a couple of years ago, there were still high levels of youth unemployment and it kept on rising regardless of the billions of cedis invested in the programme.
"We still have more than 1.3 million youth unemployed in this country so it has not benefitted the country in anyway and I see it as waste of resources probably a way to channel money through their party partners," Mr Annan asserted.
