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This post is tagged with: elections • Kwesi Amoafo-Yeboah • NDC • NPP

Mr. Kwesi Amoafo-Yeboah, the independent candidate vying for the presidency in the December polls, on Saturday said the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), would both implode before the December 7 polls.

He told the Ghana News Agency that the way the two leading political parties traded insults and accusation could only lead both of them to one thing “an implosion”.

“That is where I come in – I’ll take advantage of the situation and use the period between October 17, when I file my nomination, and December 7, to put my face and my message out there and win the elections,” he said.

He noted that whiles Ghanaians were looking for leaders who would tell them how they intend to solve their problems of unemployment, disease, low income and other things, NDC and NPP had dedicated their campaigns to pointing fingers at each other and accusing each other of causing the problems facing the country.

Mr. Amoafo-Yeboah said that was a clear indication that both political parties had nothing to offer and were heading for an inevitable implosion.

“I am not interested in who caused the problem – my preoccupation is to offer the solutions to those problems rather than blaming someone for causing them,” he said

Mr. Amoafo-Yeboah, who is also Chairman of ITEL Ghana, a mobile phone scratch card production company was the first candidate to pick his nomination forms from the Electoral Commission, whiles the various political parties accused the EC of extortion for charging 5,000 Ghana cedis for presidential candidates and 500 Ghana cedis for parliamentary candidates.

Mr. Amoafo-Yeboah noted that he picked his form early, not to show that he had money to spread but to give a clear indication that “from day one my focus had been to get my name unto the ballot paper and that is exactly what I am going to do.”

“I believe that campaigning vigorously will be a useless exercise if after campaigning I did not get my name unto the ballot paper,” he said.

If his name gets unto the ballot paper, Mr. Amoafo-Yeboah would have been the first independent candidate to have had his name on the ballot paper in the country.

Mr. Amoafo-Yeboah said he was well on his way to getting the mandated two signatories from each of the over 100 districts across the country, saying that he was already done with Accra and was sure that by October 8, 2008 he would have gotten all the signatories.

“It is not as if I am now going to look for people to sign – I already have people across the country, it is just a matter of getting the forms to them,” he said.

Mr. Amoafo-Yeboah said he had already selected his running mate, “a male”, who would be outdoored on October 16, when he would submit his nomination forms to the EC. But he refused to mention the name of his running mate.

Asked why he was not campaigning vigorously like his competitors, he said; “I do not believe in rallies, I do one on one and house to house, but between October 17 and December 7, Ghanaians will see more of me.”

Mr. Amoafo-Yeboah ridiculed promises of job creation being made by both the NDC and the NPP, saying that any political party that promised that its government would create jobs should not be taken seriously.

“Ghana Telecom, Ghana Airways and other state-owned companies are typical examples of the failure that awaits jobs created by a government,” he said.

He said it was only jobs created by the many enterprising young people and private companies in the country with the support of the state that could be sustainable.

On that score he criticized the National Youth Employment Programme (NYEP) as a system bound to fail and called for it to be phased out.

“The NYEP is being run like a welfare system and so there is no way of measuring the output of the beneficiaries and yet we have earmarked huge sums from the talk tax to give to them as handouts,” he said.

Mr. Amoafo-Yeboah said when he becomes president, he would rather give the money from the talk tax to the many enterprising young Ghanaians with great ideas and full of energy to create jobs for their colleagues.

On how he intended to run the country without a party support base in Parliament, he noted that his policies would be people-centred and he was therefore confident that parliament would support his policies even though he did not belong to any of the political parties represented in Parliament.

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