PNC flagbearer Promises A 30 Year Economic Development Strategy To Turn Country Around

The Presidential candidate of the PNC, Hassan Ayariga has promised to institute a 30 Year Development Agenda when elected into power. Taking his turn at the IEA Evening Encounter with Presidential Candidates last night, Mr Ayariga promised among others, to offer a new kind of leadership based on love, unity, transparency and honesty. Other key promises include increasing cocoa production from the current one million tonnes to one point five million tonnes as well as unemployment benefit for children, women and the physically challenged. Mr Ayariga said the main theme of his government would be: �Rehabilitation, redirection, youth empowerment and economic growth�. He said a PNC government would review the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), with the view to strengthening and expanding it, and establish a health maintenance organisation to monitor the scheme and advise the government on how to continuously enhance its operations. He stated that the PNC would revisit the Operation Feed Yourself programme of the Acheampong era, repackage it and make it a flagship project to solve the food security needs of Ghana. In furtherance of that objective, he said, his government would acquire large tracts of land across the country and lease them out to commercial farmers to engage in farming. Support in the areas of funding, farm inputs, equipment and marketing of farm produce would be provided to enable the programme to flourish. A PNC government, he said, would also rehabilitate abandoned silos and build new ones across the country to improve food storage and reduce post-harvest losses. �The intention is to provide food security for lean periods and in times of national disasters such as crop failures due to bad weather, fire outbreaks and flooding,� he added. Mr Ayariga said more irrigation dams would be constructed across the country if the PNC won power to facilitate all-year-round farming and plant pools for mechanised agriculture established to modernise agriculture and speed up the revolution in that sector. The IEA forum, held at the Kofi Annan ICT Centre, brought together representatives of interest groups namely, the labour union, health workers and women�s groups to hear from the PNC the programmes it will implement if it is elected into power in December.