CPP advocates financial discipline in political parties
The Convention Peoples Party (CPP) is calling for self-discipline in the financial administration of political parties in Ghana to reduce corruption.
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“Political parties are training grounds for people to go into governance, therefore, there is the need for parties to be financially disciplined.”
“Parties are being run without any transparency. Although we are supposed to submit financial report or statement to the Electoral Commission, most parties if not all have failed to perform this constitutional obligation,” Mr Kosi Dedey, the party’s spokesperson on education told the Daily Graphic.
Mr Dedey was reacting to this year’s Global Corruption Barometer which showed that the police and political parties were the two most corrupt institutions in Ghana.
While officials of the People’s National Convention (PNC) and the Progressive Peoples Party {PPP} agreed that there were some levels of corruption in political parties, the director of public affairs of the Ghana Police Service described the report as superficial.
The research conducted by Transparency International (TI) surveyed the public’s perceptions and experiences of corruption carried out in 107 countries covering 114,000 people in all.
In Ghana, some of the 2000 respondents were from two ministries, departments and agencies (MMDAs) in each of the 10 administrative regions.
The report also indicted the Judiciary, Lands Department, Land Valuation, Town and Country Planning and Land Title Registry, as entities that accepted bribes in their line of duty.
Coming on the heels of the 2012 Election fraught with allegations of vote buying and lack of disclosure of sources of funding for political parties, Mr Dedey said Ghanaians were getting more informed about political party organisation and they would continue to demand accountability.
“Parties must, therefore, do everything possible to sanitise the system,” he added.
In that regard, he stated that the CPP leadership was committed to sanitising the political environment of the country as it demonstrated in the setting up of a fact-finding committee to look into how the party’s finances were disbursed during the last elections in order for the party to be accountable to people.
Mr Emmanuel Wilson, the National Organiser of the PNC, also shared similar views but noted that the alleged corruption in political parties was rampant because “over the years, we have not had strong institutions to check the activities of political parties.
He observed that while the country’s political party’s law explicitly stated that parties must submit their audited accounts to the EC,it seemed it had fallen on deaf ears.
According to the New York Times, as of September, 2012, while Obama’s campaign had raised $934 million and spent $852 million, Romney raised $881 million and spent $ 752 million on television adverts alone. The sources of funding for both parties are also public knowledge in the US. In Ghana, such figures are shrouded in secrecy.
That, the PNC National Organiser said, was so because the state was lax on enforcing the law because it did not put money into the coffers of political parties.
He, therefore, called for state funding of parties to give the state powers to scruitinise political parties’ activities.
Mr Samuel Amoako, the Deputy Communications Director of the PPP, noted that while corruption might exist in other parties, the PPP had lived up to the expectations of the political parties law.
He said the inability of most political parties to disclose their sources of funding and also present their audited accounts were major draw backs to fighting corruption in the country.
He also took the government on for failing to take action on the annual Auditor-General’s report that had indicted public officials that had mismanaged state funds.
For the Public Affairs Director of the Ghana Police Service, DSP Cephas Arthur, the report was superficial.
While admitting there were some few bad nuts in the service who were misconducting themselves by collecting bribe, the practice had reduced drastically because over the years, the police had instituted measures to expose and deal with the few bad nuts.
He urged organisations researching into the police to go beyond perceptions and delve deeper into the performance of the police.
Mr Arthur, however said, the police would study the report and take a leaf of lessons from aspects that would enhance its work.
By Seth J. Bokpe/Daily Graphic/Ghana
Writer’s email: seth. [email protected]