MPs Charge Government to Disclose Cost Of Presidential Dairies…

Dr Clement Apaak, Member of Parliament for Builsa Southhas called on President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo and his government to tell Ghanaians the cost incurred in printing the 2017 and 2018 presidential dairies.

According to him, it would be better for NPP government to come clean on the matter as a way of ensuring transparency for the country.

Dr Apaak made the called during an interaction with the media in Parliament after the House adjourned sitting for the day.Nana Akufo-Addo, then flagbearer of the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) in 2015 alleged at an International Conference of the NPP at the NH Grand in Amsterdam that President John Mahama’s administration had spent$10 million on printing presidential diaries.

The then opposition leader also lambasted the NDC government for putting together $10 million as a down payment for the debt owed to Nigeria for the supply of gas to Ghana.

Dr Apaak also questioned the integrity of the current NPP administration for going ahead to print presidential dairies when in the past they had criticised it as a wasteful spending. “It is not proper to accuse your predecessors of an offenceyou couldn’t justify and then you go on and also produce a dairy” he questioned.

He called on the government to come out with the modalities they used in the printing of the recent dairies and explained that during the previous administration, the then Chief of Staff issued a letter to one of three entities which usually sent proposals indicating an interest to produce the presidential dairies.

He said upon selecting one, the letter is then given to that entity to solicit funding on their own and in return the monies that they got from that fund raising was used to defray the cost of the dairy, so we never paid a cent

He insisted on knowing the modalities the current government had deployed in producing the presidential dairy and stated that if the modalities and condition for producing the current dairies were the same as the NDC’s time, then on what basis did he accuse them of spending$10 million.

“If the current government will admit that what the NDC administration did was not wrong and that they replicatedthe same thing, fair and good, then we move on” he added.