Professor Naana Jane Opoku- Agyemang, 2020 running mate of the National Democratic Congress
The 2020 running mate of the National Democratic Congress Professor Naana Jane Opoku Agyeman has hit back at President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo over his criticism of how his predecessor handled the Komenda Sugar factory.
The President says the decision by Mr John Mahama to build the Komenda Sugar factory, without first establishing a sugarcane plantation, betrays every principle of construction.
“It is like building a house, and say you are going to start from the roof, before you have a foundation. How does the house get built? You going to start from the roof, when you haven’t built the foundation?” President Akufo-Addo asked.
According to President Akufo-Addo, “You would think that every industrial activity would begin with, first of all, what you want to do, what you want to produce. Once you identify that, then clearly, your next step has to be what are the inputs, what are the things that you need to be able to feed into your factory, to get to your outputs and you are therefore to be satisfied when you start producing your production, those inputs are there.” But this, he said, is not John Mahama’s way of doing things, as “he will rather build the roof, once the roof has been built then he will come down and then build the foundation. You know that a house built on that principle will collapse, just as Komenda collapsed.”
Reacting to the development, the former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cape Coast said the President should spend his time telling the people of the Central region what he has done for them since winning power.
“I am hoping he didn’t say so, Mr Chairman, we can decide not to look at it as an insult, we can look at it as a backhanded compliment and JM I knew you do many things I didn’t know you were a magician because I have never in my life seen anybody who can construct a roof without laying the foundation,” she told an NDC gathering in Ho where Mr. Mahama is on his Thank you tour’.
She stressed: “So now we know those who can turn this country around. It is a weak destruction, the person who wrote that speech should have put in what exactly the president has done for the people of the Central region, He should have given him a list instead of this destruction that is going nowhere. And he should have pointed out what specifically has been achieved under this government for this country and this what we needed to have seen”.