Policy Think Tank, IMANI
Africa has maintained that it has never been influenced or paid by unseen
people to wage disaffection against governments and those holding contrary view
must prove same.
“We’ve been doing this for almost 20 years and dare
anybody to come and give us any proof anybody pays us or influences us to show
disaffection to governments,” it noted.
Kofi Bentil, Vice President of IMANI Africa, insisted that anybody who held that view to the contrary should prove same saying, “Our job is to shine the light, our job is to ask questions, our job is to force our leaders to give us answers, sometimes those answers are not satisfactory.
“If they are not
satisfactory, we can choose to go to court, we can choose to force them to do
more, that is what we did with the Kelni GVG deal and when we went to court, we
forced them to do certain things.
“Officials
at IMANI Africa do not regard themselves as experts on issues bordering on national
development, rather we see ourselves as citizens who ask duty bearers critical
questions to ensure the overall wellbeing of all Ghanaians and others residing
in the country.
“I don’t think those who complain about almost
everything really take some cognisance of what we say, you have a problem we
can do too many things but your problem should not be I can do so many things,
your problem should be whether I do them well.
“I challenge anybody to pick on any issue we
decided to pick on and go into merits of what we have done, question us on
those merits, you should not have a problem we pick on wide array of issues, we
make it clear we don’t call ourselves experts, we do that deliberately.
“There is a lot of expertise in IMANI Africa but we chose not to call ourselves so because most of the challenges in the country do not require even experts’ treatments but simple, we call ourselves citizens, we occupy the office of the citizenry.
“Our constitution gives us every right to question, in our case, before we ask those questions, we do quite a lot of work when we ask those questions, we insist on getting the answers and we push back if we don’t get the answers,” Mr Bentil reiterated. -classfmonline.com
