Leading member of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Gabby Asare Otchere-Darko has hit back at former president John Dramani Mahama over his latest criticism of the government’s irrigation policy, One Village One Dam (1V1D).
Former president John Dramani Mahama while addressing supporters in Bawku as part of his tour of the Upper East Region took a swipe at the government over the implementation of the One Village, One Dam initiative.
Mr. Mahama, who described the implementation of the initiative as waste of resources, likened dams constructed under the 1V1D initiative to ponds that do not serve any agricultural purpose, accusing the Akufo-Addo’s government of abandoning irrigational projects his administration had started before it exited office and wasting resources on projects that could only serve as ponds for ducks.
“When we were in government, we were building the Tamne Irrigation Dam but we didn’t finish before we left office. After we left that project has come to a standstill. That project was to irrigate 3,000 hectares of land for dry season irrigation farming. Instead they went and started digging one village one pond. Those little duck ponds that ducks swim which they call dams. Those dams have been a complete waste of government resources,” he said.
But reacting to the former president in a post on social media, Mr. Otchere-Darko intimated that the former president is ignorant of the needs of the people of northerner Ghana.
He opined that the dams constructed under the initiative which Mr. Mahama termed as ponds have solved the water needs of the people thereby rescuing them from traveling miles in search of water as he claimed was the case before the implementation of the initiative.
“I heard JM mocking NPP in the North saying 1 Village 1 Dam is but ‘1 village 1 Pond’. He said it to people who knew they had to walk miles to fetch water before the ‘pond,” he wrote on social media.
