Member of Parliament for Bolgatanga Central Constituency on the ticket of the NDC, Isaac Adongo has described the ‘One Village, One Dam’ initiative undertaken by the Akufo-Addo’s government as a reckless waste of public resources.
According to Isaac Adongo, the initiative was among numerous campaign promises made by the then opposition New Patriotic Party and its presidential candidate just to win the 2016 elections.
But after winning the elections, he warned the party’s government against the implementation of such policies and programs as he had argued that the policies and programs were not feasible and could not be effectively implemented.
The government, however, turned a deaf ear to his warnings and went ahead to implement those policies and programs causing financial losses to the state in a manner he described as reckless.
Mr. Adongo further described the government’s industrialization policy; the One District, One Factory initiative as deceitful, adding that the NPP’s claim that it was going to move the country from taxation to production “died a stillbirth”.
“I had warned the NPP’s government in 2017 that they could be forgiven for delivering series of propaganda lectures and allowing those lectures to metamorphose into their manifesto but if they allow those propaganda lectures no matter how eloquently and confidently they were delivered to become government policies, implementation would expose them. You can do propaganda with a lecture, in fact you can decide to put them in your manifesto and deceive the people but if you attempt to translate it into government’s policies, they will not be implementable.
And that is exactly what we are seeing now. The famous policies of moving the economy from taxation to production died a still-birth. One Village, One Dam is an example of a reckless waste of public resources while One District, One Factory that was touted as a panacea to Ghana’s industrial revolution became ruse,” he stated.
The NPP and its presidential candidate, prior to the 2016 elections, promised among others to construct a dam in every village in Northern Ghana to promote an all-year-round farming. In fulfilment of the campaign promise after it won the election, it constructed hundreds of dugouts in various districts in the 5 regions of the North.
There are, however, concerns about the quality of dams constructed under the ‘One Village, One Dam’ initiative. A research conducted by the Peasant Farmers Association of Ghana revealed that 90 percent of the dams are poorly constructed and not fit for purpose.
