Gabby takes on Ken Attafuah over Akufo-Addo’s order against hiring NPP executives
- Gabby Asare Otchere-Darko believes the recent disclosures by Ken Attafuah was reckless
- Ken Attafuah disclosed that President Akufo-Addo barred him from hiring NPP executives at the NIA
- Gabby asked Attafuah to apologise for his misguided remarks
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A leading member of the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP), Gabby Asare Otchere-Darko, has called out the Executive Director of the National Identification Authority for saying he was ordered by President Akufo-Addo not to recruit NPP executives.
Ken Attafuah disclosed in a recent interview on a Kumasi-based station that the president barred him from tapping into the skills of known NPP figures for the NIA.
Source: UGC
This is because the president wants to end the practice of staffing critical state institutions with party footsoldiers.
“…he [President Akufo-Addo] has charged me that I should make sure no party executives are hired in the process,” Professor Attafuah told the Kumasi-based Angel FM.
Reacting to the disclosure, Otchere-Darko who is the owner/publisher of the New Statesman Newspaper said the NIA Executive Director “had no business stamping his feet on the expectations and hopes of unemployed party loyalists with such reckless callosity.”
“Very unwise, and some may even say selfish, considering he lost this same job when NPP lost in 2008 only to regain it after NPP regained office! At least, his memory and self-benefit ought to have even guided his tongue and stopped him from speaking out of turn,” he stated.
According to Otchere-Darko, Attafuah jammed a foot in his mouth and shot from the hip when the nozzle was aimed at his “own family jewels, so to speak.”
He called on him to apologise.
Private legal practitioner, Professor Stephen Kweku Asare, popularly known on social media as Kweku Azar, however, came to the defense of the beleaguered Executive Director of the National Identification Authority (NIA).
Speaking to YEN.com.gh, Professor Azar argued that Professor Attafuah is the last person to “look down on anyone, as some are trying to infer from his remarks.”
Meanwhile, the Volta Regional Secretary of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), James Gunu, took a dig at the president following reports that he spent GHC2.8million on his recent foreign travels.
Speaking in an interview with YEN.com.gh, Gunu said: “The president says one thing and does the opposite.”
“That is not a contested statement and is also taken directly from the NPP manifesto. The real problem that we must address is how to depoliticize our public institutions to make them work for everyone,” he added.
President Akufo-Addo, according to the North Tongu lawmaker, Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, spent a whopping GHC2.8million during his trips to South Africa and France.
Akufo-Addo used the services of a private jet, Airbus ACJ320neo which is owned by Acropolis Aviation based in Farnborough, UK, and registered as G-KELT.
It is the most luxurious and the most expensive in the Acropolis fleet.
The NDC MP said renting the jet caused the Ghanaian taxpayer approximately £15,000 an hour.
“The President is Perforating the public purse instead of protecting the public purse as he promised,” Gunu told YEN.com.gh. “He is just not thinking about the next generation of Ghanaians,” he added.
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Source: YEN.com.gh
