Former Head of Information and Public Affairs at Ghana’s Embassy in Washington, DC, Kofi Tonto has challenged the Mahama administration to explain why it did not review a port policy it now considers problematic after assuming office.
Tonto argued that the government had both the mandate and opportunity to alter policies inherited from the previous administration if it believed they were detrimental to the country.
His comments followed concerns over the policy and the government’s handling of the matter, with Tonto questioning why action was not taken earlier.
He noted that the National Democratic Congress (NDC) came to power on the promise of resetting various aspects of governance, including national security, and subsequently introduced changes to several programmes and policies inherited from the previous administration.
“Ghanaians voted for a reset,” he said. “Among the resets was the reset of national security. That President Mahama is coming in to retool, rewire, reset the entire country including our security apparatus.”
According to him, the government’s decisions concerning the Precious Minerals Marketing Company (PMMC), the electronic levy (e-Levy) and the medical drone programme demonstrated that it was prepared to reverse policies it disagreed with.
He therefore questioned why the same approach was not applied to the port policy in question.
“If this policy that he is referencing was a bad policy, why wait for a national or international embarrassment?” Tonto asked on TV3’s New Day.
He said it was inconsistent for the government to continue attributing responsibility to the previous administration for a policy it had the authority to review or abolish.
“They’ve had the opportunity to change so many things that they didn’t like,” he said.
Tonto maintained that the electorate had given the new administration a mandate to address what the NDC had described during the campaign as failures of the previous government.
“I am saying that Ghanaians voted for all, cumulatively, the very bad things that NDC said we were doing. And therefore, a new government coming in has the powers, has the mandate to fix and reset the bad things,” he said.
He argued that the focus should therefore be on why the policy was allowed to remain in operation for about two years if the administration believed it posed serious problems.
“Why should we even allow this discussion to go on?” he asked.
