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Screenshots of social media posts and old videos of politicians making pronouncements have become topical in recent politics.
Such materials are employed largely to expose a ‘lack of principles,’ or a drastic change of stance by politicians. They have also been used to highlight how politicians only criticize for convenience’s sake.
Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia is facing one such tweet in which he accuses the then Mahama administration of resorting to excuses instead of tackling economic challenges.
“Rather than admitting their culpability for the dire situation, President Mahama has resorted to providing excuses,” Bawumia’s tweet of September 2016 read.
The recent circulation of the tweet largely by opposition voices started as Bawumia delivered his April 7, 2022 State of the Economy Address at a party event in Kasoa.
A former deputy minister, Felix Kwakye Ofosu, had predicted that Bawumia’s speech amid all the economic challenges was going to be filled with excuses.
“… expect him to be limited to ridiculous excuse-making to shirk responsibility for the economic catastrophe and the falsification of economic theories in an attempt to explain away his disastrous performance as the very worst Head of the Economic Management Team.
“He will run back into his favourite rat hole because we will be ready,” Kwakye Ofosu stressed in an April 6 social media post.
About the April 7 address
In his address, Bawumia made an admission that the economy was facing headwinds before going on to explain the main causes – which he said was the impact of COVID-19 and the Russia-Ukraine war.
He also mounted a defence of the government’s intervention in seeking to reboot the economy and ease current hardships.
He pointed at interventions which among others included the scrapping of 18 taxes since the New Patriotic Party, NPP, came into office. He insisted that the party’s record was ahead of that of the erstwhile NDC government.
On the subject of the Electronic Transfer Levy (E-Levy), recently assented to by the President, Bawumia only mentioned it in passing as one of the interventions the government was employed to cure the economic malaise.
Despite being a topical issue since November 2021 when it was introduced in the 2022 budget, the Vice President – who is head of the government’s Economic Management Team – has yet to make a definitive pronouncement on the tax measure.
