Gabriella Tetteh speaks for the NDC
• Pressure continues to mount on Kwaku Agyeman-Manu to resign
• He has been embroiled in controversies surrounding the procurement of vaccines for the country
• NDC communicator, Gabriella Tetteh, says the president should show more balls on the matter
A member of the communications team of the National Democratic Congress, Gabriella Tetteh, has dared the president, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, to take a drastic action on the matter of the controversial procurement of Sputnik V vaccines.
She insists that the president ought to show some balls in addressing the concerns raised and accordingly get the Minister of Health off the job, just as has happened in other parts of the world where authorities like him have performed abysmally.
It will be recalled that the Minister of Health, Kwaku Agyeman-Manu, appeared before an ad hoc Committee constituted by parliament to look into the controversial procurement of some 3.4 million doses of the Sputnik V vaccines for the country.
The nine-member non-partisan Committee established among other things that the minister breached procurement processes and lied under oath.
Since then, there have been many mounting calls for Kwaku Agyeman-Manu to resign as investigations continue.
Adding her voice to the calls while speaking on the Good Morning Ghana program on Metro TV and monitored by GhanaWeb, the NDC communicator explained that there have been too many instances that should have gotten the president to act already.
“The WHO has signaled countries about why we should not use middlemen in the procurement of vaccines; they already signaled the warnings to us, and yet we failed to listen to those warnings and we went ahead to take our own decisions. He [Kwaku Agyeman-Manu] told the Committee that he wasn’t aware of any payment made but it turned out that they had paid $2,850,000 out of $5,700,000 and there are just too many issues around this Sputnik V procurement.
“As I said, I’m very sorry that he’s found himself in this situation but in more serious countries, health ministers have been jailed because of how they’ve managed this whole situation. We’ve had health ministers sacked – the South African health minister is an example, and I think that President Akufo-Addo has to show some balls and show that he is really interested in helping us fight this, for the health and safety of all Ghanaians,” she explained.
