The flagbearer of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), John Mahama, has said that he will scrap several government projects deemed wasteful, including the ‘One Village, One Dam’ initiative.
According to him, the country’s current economic crisis requires strategic decisions, including cutting government expenditure.
However, he said the Akufo-Addo-led administration has failed to reduce government expenditure and is only focusing predominantly on revenue generation without addressing the root causes of financial inefficiencies.
Mr Mahama said that should he emerge as the victor in the upcoming December 7 general elections, all wasteful ventures and initiatives will be eliminated, and funds will be relocated to more profitable ones.
“This government made many mistakes, and we find ourselves in this crisis again, and we need to cut down expenditure. This government is not willing to cut expenditure. In a crisis, you slash expenditures and increase revenues.
“All they are doing is increasing revenues but without reducing expenditure. We are going to eliminate all those wasteful projects, such as One Village, One Dam, and all those things that they spent billions on so that we can use that money in the more productive sectors to make the economy grow again. Like Planting for Food and Jobs,” he said.
Speaking on how his government intends to expand the Planting for Foods and Jobs initiative, Mr Mahama said, “We will use local government financial muscles to help indigenous Ghanaian local companies and so government will buy first from Ghanaian companies rather than to import from outside. I think that if we do that it will create more employment within our country. And then most importantly, we would invest in agriculture and agro-processing, we’ve never ever fully invested in the full value chain, we always give support to farmers to produce more like planting for food and Jobs, all these programmes aim at the farmers to increase his production,” he emphasised.