Kobina Tahir Hammond, Member of Parliament for Adani Asokwa in the Ashanti Region has clarified widely reported comments claiming he does not buy fuel because he doesn’t own a car.
The comment was apparently made in jest at the ad hoc committee of Parliament probing a vote of censure motion brought against the embattled Minister of Finance Ken Ofori-Atta.
Hammond is a co-chair of the committee along with Dominic Ayine.
In rebutting a point about rising fuel costs raised by Minority Leader Haruna Iddrisu on day one of the committee sitting, November 15, the Adansi Asokwa MP said, “I don’t buy fuel, I don’t have a car, so I don’t buy fuel.”
At the beginning of Day Two of sitting, KT Hammond made clarifications to his earlier statement: “On the Tuesday, I did not make any categorical such statement as to whether I buy fuel or I don’t, you should be able to distinguish various segments of what anybody speaks.
“Any sentence should be able to be broken down into its minutiae to be clear what the person is saying,” he stressed before adding that all MPs bought their own fuel because they did not have any coupons or rebates.
The fuel price situation is one plank of the general rise in cost of living bedeviling the Ghanaian economy. Price hikes have affected especially transportation fares which have increased steadily across the year.
Incidentally, the MP, only weeks ago had shared an experience where he nearly fought a fuel attendant after he though he had been shortchanged only to be alerted to the new prices of the commodity.
“We appreciate it, it’s been put on record many times, we all know what is going on, it is not a matter that anybody is running away from, we are all in it together. How we get out of it is also in the hands of all of us, let us get the reportage fairly right,” he stressed.
SARA
