President John Atta Mills is said to have snubbed the chiefs and people o the Ashanti region as he refused to invite them to a ceremony.
Speaking in an interview with the Daily Guide, the Member of Parliament (MP) for Bekwai, Joseph Osei-Owusu indicated that chiefs and MPs in the Ashanti had been left out of a sod-cutting ceremony to construct the road from River Pra to Bekwai.
Vice President John Mahama, the MP pointed out, recently cut the sod on behalf of the president for the construction of the road from Twifo Praso to Bekwai during which only Chiefs and MPs from the Central Region were invited by government.
He could not understand why the president would ignore Chiefs from the Ashanti Region and invite their counterparts from the Central Region although the entire stretch of the road is in Ashanti. According to Mr. Osei-Owusu, President Mills slighted Ashanti’s in a similar fashion during his thank-you tour of the country just immediately after the 2008 general elections when he visited only Obuasi and a zongo community in the Ashanti region.
That, the Bekwai MP indicated, was a divide-and-rule tactic, which is an affront to good governance in a democratic dispensation.
“This apartheid kind of governance is selective and it is not good for the unity of the country,” Osei-Owusu lamented.
The former Chief Executive of the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA) asked the president to acknowledge the good work of his predecessors to ensure continuous progress and development of the country. The road project from River Pra to Bekwai, he pointed out, was initiated by the Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party (NPP) administration.
According to the Bekwai MP, funding of the project was secured by the NPP administration, paving the way for the Mills administration just to implement it.