Nduom Smells Sabotage

Presidential Candidate for the CPP in the 2008 elections, Dr. Papa Kwesi Nduom is angry over the unending delay in executing the National Identification Project.

The project which started in 2006 to register all Ghanaians has been dogged with perennial lack of funds, a situation which has threatened the successful completion of the project.

The Executive secretary of National Identification Authority, William Ahadzie told Joy News the project has come to a standstill because of lack of funds. “One principal reason is again the issue about funding. It keeps coming up every turn of the road and so it makes us worry quite considerably. Unless we got the money into our hands we are not going to send [personnel] out there because what it does is that it creates a backlash for the authority and also for the government.

“We don’t want the agitation that comes with the non-payment of allowances for work done,” Ahadzie lamented in an interview with Joy News.

But Dr. Nduom who mooted the idea believed there are some unseen hands who are deliberately sabotaging the project for their selfish, political and parochial interest. “There is a lot of politics involved in this. People who don’t understand it, don’t put it high on the priority list; people don’t understand the economic benefits and so they don’t fund it the way it should be and so there is no sense of urgency. But it is destroying the Ghanaian society, contributing to the indiscipline and the corruption we have in our society.

“Some people don’t want that to happen because they want to continuously engage in the fraud that they perpetrate anytime that we go to register or open the voter’s register to vote.”

According to him the project is five years late because of the seeming lack of will to execute the project.

He would not accept the usual mantra of ‘no money’, insisting that given the importance of the project the government must of necessity find money to ensure the completion of the project. He argued the lack of the national ID card has contributed to the indiscipline on the roads, corruption, fraud and all other vices in the society. Play the attached audio for excerpts of the interviews.