What we have now is ‘nonsense’ passing as manifestos – Franklin Cudjoe
President and Founder of IMANI Ghana, Franklin Cudjoe, says with the exception of a few presidential aspirants in the past who had a ‘sense of accounting’ with regards to their promises and projects they wanted to undertake for the country, for the past few years most promises being made by presidential aspirants which ultimately form their manifestos are not quantifiable.
He made the assertion while speaking in an interview on the Joy News’ AM Show on Tuesday.
“In 2008 we started something called the business plans of politicians or political parties. We asked the question, what are their business plans? We know that countries are not run like corporate entities, but you know, the notion that a politician will use your money in order to prosecute an agenda actually means that you must have a say in whatever indeed he does with your money.
“So we thought that look, every cedi, every dollar counts, especially if the politician is negotiating on your behalf, borrowing money, or raising revenue in the country. Essentially what it meant was that we wanted to quantify the promises that they were making to Ghanaians. So that’s the mandate we imposed on ourselves way back in 2008. We then moved forward into what we now call the manifesto most of which have not really been helpful.
“But back then, some of the presidential aspirants had a sense of accounting more or less. Since then we’ve never really had that, what we now have is a festival of high optics spinning and a lot of complete nonsense that passes off as manifesto promises,” he remarked.
Speaking further, he noted that has however changed a bit since 2016 when the IMANI started tracking the campaign promises of political parties.
“But that changed when we came in, 2016 was a watershed moment when we decided to track promises of political parties during their campaign trails. And this was even before the parties themselves came up with their manifesto books,” he added.
Speaking further, Mr Cudjoe noted that IMANI has for the past 20 years been critiquing governments, asserting the mission of the think tank is to ensure governments stay on track.
