Prioritise addressing present challenges to ‘break the 8’ – Kwaku Kwarteng tells NPP

Kwaku Kwarteng, MP for Obuasi West, has asserted that if the New Patriotic Party (NPP) wants to end the eight-year electoral cycle, the party should concentrate on shattering the political norm of poor leadership and economic mismanagement.

In a public statement, he emphasised the need for quality leadership to address the current state of the country.

“To provide the kind of quality leadership required to avert the mess in which we find our country today,” he stated, adding that the party had to first admit the past and present transgressions of the political elite in order to implement “breaking the 8.”

He continued by saying that in order for the NPP to have any hope of “breaking the eight,” it would need to churn out comprehensive changes that address decades of corrupt governance and economic mismanagement.

“We must convince voters that we shall be ruthless in our determination to fix this country, that we shall stay the course no matter the challenges, and that there shall be no sacred cows.”

“We must address concerns about how much of our national resources we spend on ourselves as politicians and take steps to overhaul the corrupt public procurement regime we inherited from previous governments and have continued to live with,” said the former Parliament’s Finance Committee Chair.

He observed that the NPP’s zeal to break the 8 is not just affected by external forces but by economic mismanagement by successive governments worsening the plight of the ordinary Ghanaian.

He stated that “the economic problems Ghana is facing today, at both the national level and in households, are also the cumulative effects of many decades, spanning different governments, of the bad politics and economic mismanagement that have characterised the governance of our country.”

Further, Mr. Kwarteng criticised the piling debt levels of the country, which he believes compares to a ‘ponzi scheme’ whereby “we always offer higher interest to lenders, borrow more, use a part to repay previous debts, and the rest to pay for the current year’s overspending.”

He expressed fears that the economy and the practice of democracy will collapse if things stay the same going forward, urging a turnabout about the manner in which politics is done in the country.