A Tema-based businessman, Jerome Okyere-Akordor, who is aspiring to become the New Patriotic Party (NPP) parliamentary candidate for the Akyem Swedru Constituency, has promised to financially empower the grassroots, founding and elderly members of the party when voted as the Member of Parliament.
Speaking to the Daily Graphic at Akyem Swedru last weekend, Mr Okyere-Akordor, popularly known as Akuafo Adamfo, said when voted as an MP, he would establish agribusiness entities to enrol as many unemployed youth as possible to enable them to generate income for their livelihood.
He said he would set up a special health insurance scheme to cater for the health needs of elderly members of the NPP and also give them monthly allowances for working tirelessly to sustain the party.
Mr Okyere-Akordor said as a measure of reducing the unemployment problem in the constituency, he would establish productivity enhancement programmes such as oil palm processing factories, mass spraying and mass pollination gangs and employ most of the unemployed youth in them to make a living.
He promised to create two satellite markets at Apoli and Akotikrom, two major farming communities in the area to save farmers from exploitation by middlemen who bought their foodstuffs cheap at the farm gates and sell them at exorbitant prices in the commercial towns.
He said he was a member of the KNUST branch of TESCON from 1998 to 2002, as well as an executive member of the Chicago, USA branch of the NPP when he was doing his master's programme in Project Management at the North Western University in Chicago from 2010 to 2011.
According to Mr Okyere-Akordor, he had been offering financial support for the Akyem Swedru Constituency branch of the NPP since 2016, especially during registration exercises and on voting days by providing means of transport and pocket money for some members to travel from their workplaces to their communities and back.
He stated that in 2020, the Eastern Regional Secretarial of the NPP selected him to lead a team of monitors during the voter registration exercise for five constituencies in the Akyemansa block.
Mr Okyere-Akordor said he had been providing support for the MP campaign team in the constituency since 2016.
He said he had personally sunk wells for the Apoli Beposo community to solve their perennial water shortage and also donated roofing sheets for the reroofing of the Apoli kindergarten block when it was destroyed by a rainstorm.
Mr Okyere-Akordor, therefore, made a passionate appeal to the NPP delegates to vote massively for him during the parliamentary primary on January 27, 2024, for him to put his development plans into action.