The Research Analyst with the Centre for Democratic Development (CDD)-Ghana, Geofred Asiamah, has cautioned that apathy ahead of the 2020 elections may worsen if expectations of the citizenry are not met.
“There’s
the need for political parties to fulfil their campaign promises after winning
elections, time political parties focus on meeting expectations of voters,
impossible to draw conclusions about likely election outcome since some of the
respondents did not declare their votes,” he bemoaned.
“Key thing we have to take from findings is, if
government’s policies and programmes are responding to the needs of the
citizenry, what are they thinking and their expectations?” Mr Asiamah
quizzed.
His comments
followed CDD’s latest Afrobarometer report which revealed that 12 per cent of
the citizenry are unsure they will vote for any political party in the 2020
elections and the percentage is the highest so far since 2008, after increasing
by six points in the last two years.
Mr Asiamah challenged the political parties to
respond to expectations of the citizenry by succeeding in convincing them over
the years they would satisfy their expectations when in power.
“Compared to 2017, proportion of respondents who stated they will vote for the New Patriotic Party (NPP) has dwindled by 15 percentage points from 49 per cent to 34 per cent while those who said they will vote for the National Democratic Congress (NDC) remained unchanged, 22 per cent,” he observed.
According to
Boamah Otokunor, a Deputy General Secretary of NDC, the recent Afrobarometer
report gave indications that most of the citizenry were disappointed in NPP and
insisted that “if we do extrapolations, clearly NPP has lost support from
populace.
Buabeng
Asamoa, Communications Director of NPP,
noted that the citizenry were indecisive because expectations have not been met
yet since they were still building the country and will eventually decide as
time goes by saying “where you have a government come in and literally
drag us all the way back, when another comes in, expectation of the citizenry
is having been dragged back, rebounded quickly but the problems the previous
administration left are such that their expectations haven’t fully been met and
waiting.” -citinewsroom.com