The Deputy Minister for Tourism, Arts and Culture, Mark Okraku-Mantey, has claimed that President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo was cheered for a full minute when he appeared on-screen to deliver his remarks at the Global Citizen Festival held over the weekend.
According to him, the boos were an isolated event which occurred in a section of the crowd and was an ‘orchestrated agenda’ by the President’s political enemies.
Okraku Mantey said he was at the event and heard no boos during the President’s speech until he saw the videos on social media the next day.
“I was there. Until I left there and came home the following day, I didn’t know he was booed. I didn’t hear the chants, the shouts. I didn’t hear all that. I was with the president, his family, the Accra Mayor and the security team throughout the event. The crowd was too huge that it could have happened on just one side,” he stated during an interview with Hitz FM
“My first reaction was that, ‘could it be that it happened and I didn’t know, how come nobody tweeted about it that night?’ Why did they have to wait till after five or six hours? When the booing happened, for the first time, social media has become dormant until morning. It gives me the clue that it is a well-orchestrated agenda. You could tell that the person who took the video was even far from the stage,” he said.
Okraku Mantey insisted that he heard cheers for the President with some in the crowd even loudly shouting out some of his nicknames.
“The president was rather being cheered for about a minute. When he stood up to deliver his speech, there were loud cheers with all the numerous nicknames, Addo-D, and the others,” he said.
Okraku-Mantey added: “I have not seen any event of this gravity. Even the set-up, the size of the stage and the mammoth nature. We’ve never seen some in this country before. For a country that wants to be a number one contributor to GDP with tourism, I do not think that things like this will give us more mileage. We should turn it upside down and act like both happened there.”
Source: theGhanaianVoice.Com