PPP Not Impressed With PV Obeng's C'tee To Review GYEEDA Report

The Progressive People�s Party (PPP) has described the appointment of Mr P.V Obeng�s Committee to review the GYEEDA Report and advise the President as nothing but a cover-up engineered by the presidency. According to the PPP, the revelations from the GYEEDA report �are so disturbing that the party is compelled to suspect the new programmes were set up to divert funds from the state to individual pockets to fund the political campaign of the NDC and perpetuate the corrupt-cycle.� Speaking at a press conference organised by the party in Accra yesterday, the National Chairman of the PPP, Mr Brew Hammond, said the party was joining the call to the President to make public without delay the GYEEDA Report for the sake of transparency, probity and accountability. The PPP also called on the President to take steps to punish persons cited to have misappropriated public funds, resulting in financial loss to the state, saying �the results of all these instances were a massive waste of the public�s scarce financial resources, open collusion to steal and unimaginable corruption.� The PPP, Mr Hammond said, during the 2012 general election campaign, threw an important challenge to the aspiring presidential candidates to declare a crusade against corruption. He said it was this incorruptible integrity the party continued to refer to since it did not want to be one of those who played political games with the future of the Ghanaian. He said corruption was so much so that the country was in danger of the ballot box becoming irrelevant and the democratic dispensation illegitimate, saying that many had started asking why they should vote at all. Mr Hammond said many of those who voted looked upon it as an event and an opportunity to demand an instant reward in cash and materials with the knowledge that their votes would not fetch them anything good during a presidential term of office. The PPP national chairman urged Ghanaians to join hands to halt this decay in order to prevent the country from becoming a failed state as well as a chronic under-achiever. He added that corruption robbed the country annually of about GH�3 billion which could have been used to make free, compulsory, continuous education from kindergarten to senior high school possible. Mr Hammond said it could also be used to free Ghanaians from preventable diseases such as malaria, build first-class highways across the country as well as provide the needed funds to support the local private sector to create the jobs required to reduce unemployment in the country. Transparency, accountability, the truth and personal discipline, the PPP said, were needed if �we want to move Ghana into a higher level of performance and give our people the opportunity to enjoy a world class standard of living in our lifetime.� On its planned demonstration against corruption, Mr Hammond said the party had listened to concerns raised by patriotic Ghanaians to postpone the planned demonstration until after the Supreme Court ruling.