General News of Friday, 6 April 2018
Source: peacefmonline.com
2018-04-06
Asiedu Nketia, General Secretary of NDC
General Secretary of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), Johnson Asiedu Nketiah has accused President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo of plagiarizing almost all submissions by veteran journalist, Abdul Malik Kweku Baako Jnr on the military deal Ghana has signed with the United States of America (USA).
“I thought his [President Nana Addo] speech was Kweku Baako’s note. All he said has already been said by the editor-in-chief of the New Crusading Guide newspaper, Mr. Baako” Asiedu Nketiah said in an interview with NEAT FM’s morning show, ‘GHANA MONTIE’.
President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, on Thursday, stated unequivocally that Ghana has “not offered a military base, and will not offer a military base to the United States of America.”
According to the President, “the United States of America has not made any request for such consideration and, consistent with our established foreign policy, we will not consider any such request.”
In an address to the nation on the night of 5th April, 2018, the President stated that “in consideration of the realities of our circumstances and the challenges to peace in our region in our time, we have deemed it prudent to continue the Co-operation Agreement with the United States of America.”
Touching on the conduct of Ghana’s foreign policy, the President stated that the country’s foreign policy has been consistently bi-partisan, and no successive government has found the need to tamper with any Agreement of a non-commercial nature, entered into by its predecessor.
He noted that “we respect the age-old norms of international diplomacy that, when a country has accorded concessions and privileges to another, these are not removed or altered by a successor government, unless, firstly, the conditions under which they were granted have been reversed; or, secondly, there is proven evidence of abuse.”
President Akufo-Addo urged Ghanaians to take issue with the front-line politicians who have sought to mislead the people of Ghana in this blatant manner, and those who, for mischievous purposes, leaked the document destined for the scrutiny of Parliament prematurely to a section of the media, who then went on to describe it as a “secret document”.
But the NDC Chief Scribe maintained rather sarcastically that the president appeared to be reading a note from ‘his good friend’, the Senior Journalist – “the only addition to the Kweku Baako notes he (President) plagiarized were the insults to Ghanaians and the anger he (President) exhibited in the delivery of his speech”.