The IMANI Centre for Policy Education (CPE) has revealed that many of the guarantees contained within the manifestos of three political groupings in Ghana, are imprecise, thus non-quantifiable.
The political groupings are; the New Patriotic Party (NPP), National Democratic Congress (NDC) and Movement for Change (M4C).
This was disclosed by a Senior Research Associate at IMANI Centre for Policy and Education, Dennis Asare at an occasion to disseminate content material of a report they name IMANIfesto on November 5.
“IMANIfesto as we call it, remind the people of Ghana that the power to hold the government accountable is in their hands.
Through a three-prong process of evaluating financial viability of each promise, its potential impact on private sector
development, and overall policy implications of its implementation, we launch a thoroughly examined report of manifestos
put forth by the New Patriotic Party (NPP), the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the Movement for Change,” Mr Asare defined.
The events have been chosen primarily based on their efficiency on the IMANI Public Understanding and Literacy for Sentiment and Election (PULSE) evaluation device, which measures public sentiments concerning the candidates and political events
on social and conventional media.
“And we chose these political parties because, at the start of this exercise, these were the ones that had launched their manifestos,” he mentioned.
The train targeted totally on “The Economy: Assessing proposed economic policies and their potential impact on Ghana’s growth and development, Governance: Evaluating commitments to governance reforms, transparency, and accountability etc., Energy and Infrastructure: Analyzing the feasibility of energy policies and infrastructure development plans, and Education and Social Services: Reviewing plans for improving education and social services, and their alignment
with the needs of Ghanaians.”
According to him, the report categorised the varied guarantees as quantifiable, semi-quantifiable and non-quantifiable.
“Some of the promises are really quantifiable, you can really see what the parties want to do. Some are semi-quantifiable, something needs to happen before what they are promising will happen, and some are just vague, not quantifiable. You don’t specifically see what the political parties want to achieve,” Mr Asare famous.
“In the case of the NPP you can count about 574 promises…you will see that there are more non-quantifiable promises in that manifesto. So, there are more vague promises. If you go to the NDC manifesto, there are about 851 promises… you see a lot more non-quantifiable promises which shows more vague promises. Now you look at Movement for Change, same, a lot more of non-quantifiable promises.
“So, what we are saying is that most of the promises by these political parties in their manifestoes are vague. You can’t really see the specific services that they want to offer. So, in case any of them is elected, it is very difficult to hold them accountable,” Mr Asare acknowledged.
He added that “the manifestos are overly ambitious and there are no costs to the promises.”
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