Stop digging when you are in a ditch; Asamoah Boateng tells government


A flagbearer hopeful of the New Patriotic Party, Stephen Asamoah Boateng says government should admit the economy is in crisis and avoid taking decisions that will aggravate the situation.

According to him, acknowledging the failure to put the economy of the nation in a good form will inform the right strategy to be adopted to get out of the mess.

The Bank of Ghana last week reviewed some measures it introduced in February this year to check the fall in the value of the local currency.

But quoting former president Jerry Rawlings, the former Information Minister in the John Kufuor administration said: “When you are in a pit you stop digging”.

He was speaking on the Super Morning Show on Joy FM, Monday June 16, 2014.

“You have to acknowledge that [the economy is in crisis] and find the right strategy to get out of it,” the former Mfantsiman West MP advised.

Mr. Asamoah Boateng is faced with perhaps the most arduous task of his political career – beat the NPP’s two time presidential candidate, Nana Akufo-Addo, Alan Kyeremateng, Dr. Kofi Konadu Apraku and Francis Addai Nimoh, – to realise his dream of leading the NPP into the 2016 presidential elections.

Mr. Asamoah Boateng disclosed that although politics was not his preferred career growing up, he is motivated by the fact he is capable of changing the fortunes of the nation if delegates of the opposition party give him the nod at the December 6 congress.

“I believe those of us who were privileged to be conceived and born in the happy moods [1950s]…we have a greater responsibility to restore that hope, and that’s what I’m in this game for,” he said.

Political life
Mr. Asamoah Boateng is former student leader and admired Flt. Lt. Jerry John Rawlings, then chairman of the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) which staged a military coup to overthrew another military regime -Supreme Military Council in 1979 and restored democracy to Ghana.

He later fell out with the military leader after he (Rawlings) became “recalcitrant” and was forced into exile.

He worked closely with former British Prime Minister -not as an appointee but as a supporter- during his stay in the United Kingdom until the late 1990s when he decided to come back home to join the campaign team of the NPP ahead of the 2000 elections.

He shuffled between the Local Government Ministry Environment Ministry, Information Ministry and the Tourism Ministry until the NPP lost the 2008 elections to the governing National Democratic Congress (NDC).

Politician or a Pastor
He had wanted to become a pastor while growing up but that dream was knocked off along the way as his love for politics grew stronger to the dismay of his mother.

But the two are not entirely different he said.
“When I was a young boy the impression I had was that I was going to be a pastor (that was the profession I wanted)…but I believe this [politics] is part of the calling”.

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