The Founding President and Chief Executive Officer of IMANI Centre for Policy and Education, Franklin Cudjoe, is completely opposed to the idea of the state bearing some of the cost incurred by political parties during elections.
“I totally oppose any attempt by the state to fund political parties even if we are to consider the idea, it will be predicated on performance but that is even the second order of issue and the first order of issue is a no,” he reiterated.
This comes on the heels of former President John Mahama’s suggestion that the state finances campaigns of viable political parties in order to prevent financiers from determining electoral outcomes.
According to Mr Cudjoe, political parties pride themselves as mass mobilisers of people and in the country, he was sure the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the New Patriotic Party (NPP) could boast of about half the number of people that go to the polls.
He pointed out that it was not in the place of the citizenry to contribute towards a party but its members but “if the party while in power has contributed to the progress, growth and development to the extent that the individuals had built for themselves sufficient bulwarks against poverty there would have been no qualms at all about people being asked to contribute.
“I truly understand and support John Mahama on his call for political campaign reforms, however, I have reservations because the only part I support is the crowd-funding as it will eliminate situations where political parties owe big wigs who fund them,” Mr Cudjoe indicated.
Former President Mahama during a public lecture on March 22, at the University of Professional Studies Accra (UPSA) auditorium stated that viable political parties play strong roles in promoting democracy in the country hence the need for the state to incur some of their expenditure in future.
He admitted that the state was now broke and financing political campaigns going into the 2024 general election was not an option and recommended that public funding of political parties be scaled up in the future supervised by an independent and credible institution to ensure fairness and firmness in the sharing formula.
