What has been described as a fanciful attempt by the Ghana Beyond Aid Committee to hold consultations with the various political parties in the country ended up as eggs on the faces of the Committee’s members on Tuesday.
A meeting that was put together by the Committee was snubbed by all political parties except the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP).
Consequently, a conference room at the plush Alisa Hotel in Accra which had been hired for the meeting with the political parties was only half filled while a buffet of expensive hotel food that had been pre-ordered for participants was mostly untouched.
The embarrassing experience is said to have informed an idea that the Committee members rather go round the offices of the various political parties to meet with them – basically Mohammed refused to go to the mountain, and so the mountain must come to Mohammed.
It is not clear why the likes of the Peoples National Convention (PNC), the Convention Peoples Party (CPP), the PPP and the National Democratic Congress (NDC) refused to send representatives to the Ghana Beyond Aid Committee’s meeting at the Alisa Hotel in Accra on Tuesday.
But the development appears to confirm very popular sentiment that, nobody really takes the Committee, which is seen to be an expensive figment of the imagination of a grandiloquent President Akufo-Addo, serious.
Even the Dutch Ambassador to Ghana, Ron Strikker, has mocked the President’s declaration of a Ghana Beyond Aid with the famous scoff, “how about Ghana beyond corruption?”
At Tuesday’s largely abandoned meeting, only the NPP had sent a delegation; and it was a high powered one. It included Senior Minister Yaw Osafo Maafo, party national Chairman and Chairman of the GNPC Board, Freddy Blay and party General Secretary, John Boadu.
Apart from the well known skeptism for the ‘Ghana Beyond Aid’ mantra, the NPP is also having to deal with banana peels now that it is in government – when it was in opposition, it rejected invitations from the then NDC government to meet and discuss national development. Among others, the NPP had snubbed President Mahama’s Senchi meeting on the Economy, which resulted in the Senchi Consensus that was presented to the IMF for an economic program.