Emmanuel Mensah
Deputy General Secretary of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), Mustapha Gbande, has made strong allegations against the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), accusing the government of diverting and misusing funds allocated for its flagship Planting for Food and Jobs programme.
Speaking in an interview on Starr Chart with Bola Ray, Gbande described the initiative once hailed as a bold step toward food security as nothing more than a conduit for corruption and political patronage.
“They told you and I that they were going to do Planting for Food and Jobs. Brilliant policy… but they brought the project and chopped the money,” Gbande charged. “They didn’t try in order to say they failed. They have chopped the money.”
He further argued that despite significant funds being allocated to the programme, its impact on agricultural production and food security remains negligible.
“Go to the market today and ask for a bag of maize, how did that deal with food security? Money went into it, but what did we see?” he asked.
Gbande went on to allege that there was widespread mismanagement and theft within the programme, referencing a previous interview with Malik Basintali, who reportedly exposed how a deputy minister in the Upper West Region, along with his driver and brother, stole items meant for farmers.
“Even the regional minister had to caution him. Do you need more evidence to know that this was poorly supervised?” he said.
Beyond agriculture, Gbande criticized other major NPP policies, calling them “scams” cloaked as development projects.
“One District, One Factory — that was a scam. Free SHS was a good policy, but poorly executed. They used it as a political tool, not a social intervention,” he asserted.
He added that the Free SHS policy could have changed lives including his own but claimed it was turned into a vote-winning strategy with little regard for quality or sustainability.
“I had to struggle to pay my school fees. Free SHS would have helped people like me. But they fed the students poorly, didn’t invest in infrastructure, and teachers weren’t motivated. It was a good vision, but the execution was politically motivated,” he said.
The NDC Deputy General Secretary maintained that the ruling government’s focus was never on effective implementation, but rather on leveraging public policies to enrich themselves and win elections.
