Members of the minority New Patriotic Party in parliament are attending Thursday’s State of the Nation of Address by President Mahama in mourning clothes.
In sharp contrast however, members of the majority National Democratic Congress are in bright colours.
The Member of Parliament for Aburi-Nsawam, O.B. Amoah says the intent is to send the president a clear message that the country is in darkness and the people are mourning.
No, the gesture is not to intimidate the president, he told Radio Gold’s Alhassan Suhuyini on live radio, but it is “probably to give him a message, after all he (the president) said that when we went on “wongbo” demonstration it inspired him to do more, so today too we are giving him the message. Indeed he must have known, but we want to tell him that Ghana is in darkness and we are mourning”.
He does not expect President Mahama to merely face parliament with packaged niceties because that will not be enough. He wants the president to properly account for his stewardship by showing what concrete achievements he can boast of.
But for Richard Quashigah, NDC MP for Keta, the occasion is one of hope for a better tomorrow because the president and his team have put in very realistic plans to regularize energy production and supply.
According to Quashigah, it is even more hypocritical for the NPP to come pointing accusing fingers at the president when in their own time in power, they did absolutely nothing to augment national power generation in spite of their lofty promises captured in their own state of the nation address for 2008.
“…today marks a day of hope for a better tomorrow. The fact that a lot of people are in dark on the other side because they claim that they are mourning and the fact that we have challenges with energy. But the truth is that if you assess the situation very well, President Mahama absolutely, really delivered in spite of the challenges. 534 megawatts of power that was added to the energy stock that we had is significant, that was in 2013. And a lot more efforts are being done to add more. We all know too well that anytime water levels in the Akosombo Dam drop, we definitely will sneeze, we catch the cold. We also know that Kpong is suffering from the same issue …. All these have necessitated where we are…”
According to Quashigah, if the NPP will give all the efforts of President Mahama only 30 percent performance as far as the energy situation is concerned, then they deserve only 10 percent or even less for doing virtually nothing.
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