Chief's Endorsement Of Mills Is A Joke � Akomea

Communications Director of the New Patriotic Party, Nana Akomea has described the endorsements given by the chief of Akyem Tafo in the Eastern Region as a joke. According to Nana Akomea, �the endorsement from the chiefs to President Mills is a joke, go back to the times when Rawlings was President and you will see that what the chiefs said to him when he went there to visit is similar to what they said to Kufuor when he was President. "I went with Kufuor on some of the trips and I can tell that is what they all say�. President Mills concluded his three day working visit of the Eastern Region where he inspected ongoing projects and commissioned new ones. There have however been disputes over some of the projects President Mills commissioned because there have been arguments as to whether or not these projects were started under the previous NPP administration. Osabarima Adusei Peasah, the Akyem Tafo chief, was quoted by the Daily Graphic as saying �by the end of his (President Mills) eight-year term, the Akyem Abuakwa State would have benefited immensely from the work the President has started�. Whiles the NDC government gratefully acknowledges the endorsement given President Mills by the chief, Nana Akomea thinks such endorsements are not new and should not go to the heads of government officials. Nana Akomea was speaking on Metro TV�s Good Morning program where he said �the chiefs will congratulate you and ask for more, they are just being diplomatic�. However, a deputy Information Minister, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, who was also on the programme, condemned Nana Akomea,s comments. �It is important that we don�t disrespect our chiefs and put them in a certain corner that says that 'don�t take chiefs seriously,' its just diplomacy, they don�t mean what they're saying. "If a chief commended President Kufuor and is commending President Mills, what is wrong with that? It only means that President Kufuor at that time was doing something good and President Kufuor had a second term based on all these commendations...so if you�re doing something good, the chiefs would say it and if you�re not conducting yourself well and you have not brought any development to their area, they would say it. �Let us not, based on what the chiefs say today which we might not like, juxtapose it to what they said yesterday, and try to antagonize the chief. I think that is not fair and absolutely unnecessary�. The NPP communications director however charged government to tackle the real problems Ghanaians are facing. �Problems facing Ghanaians are unemployment and poverty but the government doesn�t seem to have any clue on how to solve them� he insisted. Nana Akomea said the government had lost track of the reality on the ground and is not fulfilling the promise of reducing poverty and creating the much talked about jobs. Mr Okudzeto Ablakwa opined that government is on course and fulfilling the job creation promise and noted that �most of these projects that were commissioned by the President provided jobs for Ghanaians and don�t forget that while you�re expanding this infrastructure, you�re creating jobs, you are involving more artisans, more engineers and more surveyors and that in itself is job generation. "When you�re done, because you have opened up the place, you have made the place worth living and you create economic potential so there is a direct co-relation and you can tell that there are coordinated programmes to create jobs�.