[ 2012-05-04 ]

Akufo-Addo: I will not condone any ethnic agenda
In what seems to be his first public statement
against the genocidal comments by Assin North MP,
Kennedy Agyapong, the flagbearer of the opposition
New Patriotic Party, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo
says he will not condone any ethnic agenda by any
member of the party.

Addressing chiefs and people of the Volta region
as part of his tour, Nana Addo emphatically stated
that he will not tolerate any act that seeks to
divide Ghanaians.

Pressure has been mounted on the NPP flagbearer,
mainly from officials of the NDC, to condemn the
comments by Kennedy Agyapong after the latter
declared war on his radio station, Oman FM.

However, Nana Addo in his address added that
contrary to allegations against him, he does not
harbour such motives and will not allow any member
of the NPP to engage in any act that can plunge
the country into violence.

“I want to state here with all the emphasis of my
command that I do not have any ethnic agenda and I
would not condone any such agenda” Nana Akufo-Addo
said.

Read the full text of Nana Akufo-Addo's speech
below

NANA AKUFO-ADDO SPEAKS TO VOLTA REGIONAL HOUSE OF
CHIEFS:
“I AM FOR PEACE, UNITY AND PROSPERITY”

Togbewo, Nananom, Mamawo, novinyewo, medo gbe
nami

I am very happy to be here and I want to thank
the President of the House for giving me this
opportunity to address this august House of
Chiefs. For sometime now, I have been hoping to to
meet with you and I was mightily pleased when this
week, after returning from my trip abroad, the
President, the famous Togbe Afede XIV, the
Paramount Chief of Asogli Traditional Area,
indicated that this meeting would take place
today. Thank you. I am most grateful, Sir. I am
humbled that so many of you have made the time to
come and listen to me. Whoever said my friends
were in single digits in this part of the
country!

I am Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, the
presidential candidate for the New Patriotic
Party. Hence my presence here. And in coming here,
I came with the lady who brightens my life, my
wife Rebecca, and whom I recommend to you,
especially Mamawo, for her shy but warm and
engaging personality.

The Volta Region is home to many eminent people
who were leading lights in the various movements
and parties that have become today’s New Patriotic
Party. Persons such as R G Armattoe, Modesto
Apaloo, Kodzo Ayeke, S G Antor, Rev Ametorwobla,
Kodzo Dumoga, S K Ohene, J Y Oseibre, Courage
Quashiga and many others. It is also the home of
Sam Okudzeto, Timothy Amesimeku, Agnes Okudzeto,
Osei Nyame, Tommy Ametekpor, and my fellow
Legonite, Elizabeth Ohene.

It is well-known that the NPP has not fared well
in this region. But, it is also a fact, perhaps,
not well known, that this is one of four regions
where our share of the votes has been consistently
rising since 1992. Indeed, the NPP got its highest
share of the popular vote in the Volta Region in
2008, when I was first nominated to lead my party
in the presidential race. So, I think it would be
fair and modest for me to say aloud that the Volta
Region has done enough to prove to me, my party
and the rest of the country, that she is willing
to adopt me as a true son.

The rest, I believe, is left to me, my vision, my
commitment, my party and our programmes to show to
you that we seek a genuine relationship.
Thankfully for me, the good works of the last NPP
government in not discriminating against this
region, or any other region for that matter,
offers a convenient start for me. It is evidence
of our sincerity and determination to build a
society of aspirations and opportunities for every
Ghanaian, regardless of his or her geography,
ideology, or biology.

But, I will be the first to admit that beyond the
programmes and policies of the NPP to develop
every part of the nation, the posture, attitudes
and utterances of our party members are critical
to developing this hopefully growing bond between
the NPP and Voltarians.

I prefer to believe that our inability to jump
the electoral hurdle in the region has been
because we in the NPP have not done a good job at
communicating our message. I say this because I
know that the NPP message ought to have fertile
soil in this region. This is the party that has
always championed the cause of Ghana as a land of
opportunity.

We celebrate the fact that Ghana stands tall
among nations as having a rich society of
diversity, tolerance and co-operation. Ours is a
society of multi-ethnic and multi-religious
diversities who have found the wisdom to live in
peaceful co-existence. What is left, however, is
how the leaders of this nation of manifest destiny
can use the prevailing atmosphere of peace, unity,
diversity and harmony to enhance the dignity and
prosperity of every Ghanaian.

An interesting feature of our country is that you
can find every ethnic group in every region.
Ghanaians have never felt restrained by the place
of their birth in determining where they live or
work in our country.

My running mate, the young, respected economist,
Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, said something interesting in
the speech he gave on Wednesday. He said, in our
race for economic development, the competition is
not with each other, in other words, it is not
between NDC and NPP or Dagombas and Kokonbas,
Fantes and Gas, or Ashantis and Ewes, or Akyems
and Krobos. The competition is with China, with
South Africa, Malaysia, Korea, India, Brazil and
other countries in the global economic space. We
should never forget this.

Of course, there is and must be a healthy
competition between political parties to give
Ghanaians a choice between a different set of
ideas on how we develop our nation. But this
should be nothing more, nothing less than a
competition of ideas, commitment, competence and
solutions. This competition should never endanger
the Ghanaian project.

Education and Skills
As you may be aware, I am determined to institute
a free Senior High School systemm and I wish to
reiterate this commitment here before you, because
I know how dear the education of children is to
the people of this region. We need to make Senior
High School the required basic school for all
children in order to give them a fair chance in
life.

In 2005, the first batch of Class One pupils to
enjoy free basic education was enrolled. This
year, the 2012-2013 academic year, that group of
children have just completed their BECE (Basic
Education Certificate Examination) and are
anxiously awaiting their results in the hope of
continuing to Senior High School. After having
allowed these children free access to basic
education it would be a national tragedy to stand
unconcerned for many of them to be denied access
to secondary education because their parents could
not afford it.

You, in this House, know better than most the
tradition of the whole family, the whole clan, the
whole village banding up together to send a bright
young child to secondary school; you have done it,
you have been beneficiaries yourself.

People believe that if that one child is helped
to make it, he or she would become the instrument
for pulling the whole family/clan/village out of
poverty. Often such children have not
disappointed. I am determined to ease that burden
on such children by allowing every child in every
family, every clan, every village access to free
education from kindergarten to the secondary
level.

There are those who say it cannot be done. Just
like there were those who doubted our capacity to
introduce a national health insurance scheme.
Leadership, as we know, is about choices. I will
choose to spend wisely and efficiently in
allocating resources to develop our children for a
brighter future. It is the best investment that
any society of conscience and of vision can make
and Ghana ought not be an exception.

It will be expensive but it is far too expensive
now that we allow so many young people on to the
streets after Junior High School without any
skills for jobs. As they say, if you think
education is expensive, try ignorance.

My vision for this country is to build a society
of aspirations and opportunities for all
Ghanaians. Building such a society entails the
provision of universal access to quality education
and health in an economy retooled for
industrialisation and value-addition.

A society that aims to transform itself into a
modern productive player in the global market must
get its educational policies right. An educated
and trained workforce will help transform our
economy, an educated and trained population will
give us the confidence required to deal with the
rest of the world in the competitive economy. The
provision of quality education and skills training
will therefore be at the top of our agenda. And in
talking about education, let me say how glad I am
that a new public university is being developed in
this region. I am committed to the principle that
every region in our country should have at least
one public university. Let me wish the University
of Health and Allied Sciences every success.

Transformation of the Economy
During the period of the NPP government, ably led
by HE John Agyekum Kufuor, Ghana finally
discovered oil in commercial quantities in 2007.
An equal focus will be given by the next NPP
government to the exploration of the off- and
onshore possibilities of oil and gas in this
region. We have two options now: one, to treat the
oil like we have done to gold and allow it to be
exported in its raw material form as crude or;
two, use this as a perfect opportunity to
transform the structure of our economy through
industrialisation and value-added commercial
activities. I am for the latter because we can no
longer continue to rely on the production and
export of raw materials for our living as we have
done for the last century if we are to create jobs
and prosperity for the broad masses of our
people.

My economic vision will focus on building an
integrated industrialisation programme, with a
clear bias towards supporting our small and medium
scale enterprises with access to science and
technology, incentives and markets to make them
more productive and competitive. This means our
small business people will form the foundations of
this new industrial policy: And I will support
them.

Ghana should be at the forefront of the
industrialisation of West Africa. We will add
value to our bauxite by building an integrated
aluminium industry and export manufactured
aluminum products. We will add value to our iron
ore by developing a new iron and steel industry.
We will add value to our new found gas by
developing a strong petro-chemical industry in
Ghana, using both private and public capital. The
development of our salt will be part of this new
vision. Equally part of this vision will be the
development of the Volta Basin, which a study by
the Geological Survey Department in 2008, during
the NPP tenure of office, has shown to be a
potentially rich deposit of considerable minerals
– cobalt, nickel, diamonds, gold and hydrocarbons.
I want to see a West Africa that is working
together to create jobs for its people; and
providing decent lives for its 350 million
population and I want to see Ghana being at the
driving seat of that regional project. And here I
want to commend the house, under your leadership,
Togbega, for the initiative of signing a
“sister-region” co-operation pact with a province
of China.

Agriculture
It is estimated that three-fifths (59.7%) of the
people in this region are in agriculture and
related occupations. The agriculture sector,
therefore, is one area where success will be felt
by the majority of Ghanaians, in the form of
improved food security and dependable incomes for
the large farming population in the rural areas.
However, over the couple of years, the performance
of this sector has been very worrying because of
its importance in our economy and in particular
the number of livelihoods that depend on this
sector. The data shows that rather than expanding,
the agriculture sector of the economy has seen
steadily declining growth from 7.4% in 2008 to
0.8% by 2011.

Thus, the challenge is to apply the same vigour
to tackling the decline as we intend to do in
education. The NPP sees agriculture as a major
wealth creation venture for the Ghana
transformation project.

Job Creation
The phenomenon of unemployment among the youth of
Ghana is, without doubt, the biggest threat to
social peace. We ignore it at our peril. We
believe that bold initiatives must be taken to
address this problem. And in this respect, the
vigorous exploitation in this region of its
mineral, tourist, agricultural, salt and water
transportation potentials will make a big
contribution to job creation.

An NPP administration is committed to creating
the conditions that will allow the private sector
to flourish as the surest way of generating
sustainable jobs for the mass of our youth. But we
recognise also that Government has a duty to
contribute to the creation of employment
opportunities, with the central role to be played
by the private sector.

Self-employment will be promoted with support
mechanisms such as access to credit, management
training, and preferences in public procurement to
give hope to the hordes of street peddlers, of
kiosk owners, and of lotto and telephone card
roadside entrepreneurs.

Working together
Togbega, my own involvement with Voltarians goes
a long way back.
I recollect my first journey to what is now Volta
Region in 1950. I was six years old and my father
took me to Keta to visit his good friend and
fellow lawyer, Ben Tamakloe. On reflection, they
must have been really good friends because, as I
recall it, the roads were not good, but it was a
delightful journey for an eager, inquisitive young
boy. Those were the days when the great minds of
that generation were plotting to free our people
from colonial rule.

I recall when in 1977, as General Secretary of
the PMFJ, I worked alongside Gen Akwasi Amankwah
Afrifa (the bosom friend of a remarkable son of
this soil, Gen Emmanuel Kwasi Kotoka), my own
uncles Paa Willie and Jones Ofori-Atta, Albert Adu
Boahen, Komla Agbeli Gbedema, Godfrey Agama, Obed
Asamoah, Sam Okudzeto, Johnny Hansen, Nii Amaah
Armatefio, and others to fight, with courage but
without weapons, against the Union Government
concept of Gen Acheampong. We succeeded in helping
defeat the idea in order to return our nation to
multiparty democracy.

One of the highlights of my career at the Bar was
the time in 1979 when I had the honour of
defending the late Chief Justice Fred Apaloo, who
did his pupilage in my late father’s celebrated
Kwakwaduam Chambers, in the Supreme Court against
the attempt of the Limann government to remove him
from office in the famous case of Tuffuor vs the
Attorney-General. I led a group of young lawyers
including the then youthful Tsatsu Tsikata, in
that case, and we worked successfully together to
win that critically important case for the
independence of the judiciary.
In all these, what comes out is that, when we
work together for a common purpose on the basis of
commonly shared principles, we succeed.

Databank is one of the most successful companies
in this country and I suggest that it is an
example of how we work best when we pull our
resources together. This company was started in
1990 as some of you might know by three young men,
Ken Ofori-Atta, my cousin, Keli Gadzekpo, the
current CEO of Databank and James Akpo, now
elevated as Togbe Afede XIV.

I don’t think they stopped to inspect each
other’s birth certificates before they got
together. No prejudice stood in their way. They
were three young men who saw an opportunity and it
did not matter where they came from, their ideas
and determination to work hard and succeed were
more important.

Our prejudices hold us back like iron chains when
they stop us from recognizing opportunity when we
see it. We must be proud to celebrate our
differences and even share the occasional harmless
joke about where we come from, but we should never
allow the richness of our differences to become a
currency of spite and hate.

Let us shout out loud, right from this great
hall, to all the four corners of the nation, to
every man, woman, boy and girl, a message that is
understood in every language, by every ethnic
group in Ghana. Deka wor-wor! Deka wor-wor! Unity!
Unity! We must be united in our quest for
development. United in celebrating our
differences. United in respecting each other.
United in tolerating each other. United in
understanding each other.

We have made many strides but equally so we have
made many mistakes, made many wrong turns
politically, socially and economically over the
last fifty five years. However one thing has
always stood clear. We have a DNA as a nation that
has at its very core humanity, as exemplified in
our national motto of Freedom and Justice, and at
the very least our unwritten desire for peace and
unity. This has stood the test of time, even under
the most testing of authoritarian regimes. Even
when many African nations that gained independence
after us tore themselves apart through ethnic
conflicts, Ghana remained united. Let us preserve
this and treasure it, the Ghana Project.
In my three or more decades in frontline politics
and, recently, in the course of my Listening Tour
across Ghana, our common values as a people, the
commonalities of our thoughts, fears, concerns as
people and our desire for peace and our hope for
the future remain clear to me. In my subsequent
Tour of Hope, it is becoming even clearer how
hungry Ghanaians are for a message of hope and
unity; for a leadership that will deliver security
and prosperity. There are bound to be differences
of opinions among us, but these differences of
opinion should not shake our allegiance to Ghana.
Ghana must be first and foremost in all our
dealings and thinking. Our nation’s peace,
stability, freedom and democracy are more
important than anyone’s ambition, including my
own.

I have dedicated myself to public service in all
my entire adult life, because I believe we can
achieve far more for this land and for all her
people than we have so far realized and I want to
contribute to this collective effort. I believe
deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our
time unless we solve them together - unless we
build our nation by understanding that we may come
from different backgrounds, but we hold common
hopes and aspirations; that we may not look the
same and we may not come from the same place or
speak the same language, but we all want to move
in the same direction - towards a brighter future
for all our children and their children. A strong
Ghana must be based on the strength of its entire
people. This is my profound conviction which will
always guide my conduct.
We must not allow our stories of national
survival, our stories of sacrifice, and our
stories of unity to give way to inflamed passions,
tribally charged language and selective use of
state power.
Recently, when I was out of the country in the
United States, a great controversy occurred which
created a great storm. My party issued a statement
on it and I fully endorse the sentiments expressed
by my party in that statement, which binds all
members of the NPP. The matter is now before
court, and I believe that the public interest
demands that we allow the matter to be resolved
there, and not continue to fan the issues
generated by the statement.
I want to state here, though, with all the
emphasis at my command, that I do not have any
ethnic agenda to promote, and I will not condone
any such agenda.
Since we embarked on our democratic journey in
1992 with the founding of the Fourth Republic by,
perhaps, the most famous son of this soil, HE
Jerry John Rawlings, our achievements have been
significant in many areas. They include two
decades of uninterrupted democracy and freedom.
They include two peaceful changes of power from
government to opposition parties in 2001 and 2009.
They include elections that have been hailed
across the world as models for the rest of Africa
to emulate. They include having the closest
election in our continent’s history in 2008,
without any major disturbances. They include
substantial improvements in our infrastructure,
poverty reduction and the introduction of social
programmes that have helped the poor.

Despite these achievements, as we approach our
sixth election, there are those who are worried
that the centre seems not to be holding. Even at
the registration stage, there has been violence
leading to injuries. There have been statements
that have unfortunately aggravated ethnic
tensions. As a result, many have questioned our
ability to have a peaceful election. They have
questioned the ability and the commitment of our
security forces to maintain peace. They have
questioned the fairness of our state institutions.
They have questioned the impartiality and fairness
of our religious, traditional and opinion leaders.
They have wondered about the virtues and vices of
a free press. And finally, they have questioned
the commitment of our political leaders—including
myself, to peace.

I want to say, here and now, that I am
unequivocally committed to peace in our country.
That is why in 2008 when I lost the presidential
election by the smallest margin in our political
history, and indeed in the history of Africa, I
accepted the verdict of the Electoral Commission
without demanding a recount or inciting my
supporters, and thereby avoiding the spilling of
even a single drop of Ghanaian blood. My resolve
remains the same today.

I believe the fundamental solution to all the
anxieties connected to the 2012 election is for
the rule of law to be allowed to reign. It is
maintenance of the rule of law, which requires the
enforcement of law and order without fear or
favour, that can guarantee us peace, security and
justice. The rule of law, properly so called, is
gender neutral, colour blind, non-tribal and
non-partisan. The rule of law is the glue that
binds a free society together in peace and
harmony.
All throughout our political history as a nation,
from colonial times to independent Ghana, from the
Bond of 1844, to the formation of the Aborigines
Rights Protection Society in 1897 and to the
formation of the first nationalist political
party, the UGCC in 1947, our gallant forbears only
had one thing in mind – to chart the course of our
collective history, irrespective of our ethnic
backgrounds. Their objective was to lay the
foundations of our faith to defend, support and be
prepared to serve a free and unified nation. To
them believing in one nation meant not allowing
their energies to be sapped away by either the
failures of the past or the challenges of the day.
This is the belief that I have inherited, which
drives my politics, my personal philosophy and my
decision to dedicate myself to the public service
of Ghana and to seek the high office of president.

I believe in Ghana’s rich diversity and unity. I
believe in the fortitude of the Ghanaian. I
believe in Ghana’s manifest destiny.
And so Togbewo, Mamawo, I look forward to
partnering with you, by the grace of God if
elected president, to introduce free quality
senior high school education, industrialise our
country, including developing the resources in the
Volta Region and improving the road infrastructure
in this region.

Togbewo, Nananom, Mamawo, let us work together to
move Ghana forward.

Togbe Afede XIV, President of the Volta Regional
House of Chiefs, and all you eminent chiefs and
queen mothers, I thank you sincerely for this
opportunity.

God bless you and God bless our homeland Ghana.

Source - RadioXYZonline.com

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