Founding President and Chief Executive Officer of IMANI Centre for Policy and Education, Franklin Cudjoe has kicked against proposals for the state to fund political parties.
He is completely opposed to the idea of the state bearing some of the cost incurred by political parties during elections.
This comes on the heels of former President John Dramani Mahama’s suggestion that the state finances campaigns of viable political parties in order to prevent financiers from determining electoral outcomes.
“I totally oppose any attempt by the state to fund political parties. Even if we were to consider the idea, it would be predicated on performance. But that’s even the second order of things. The first order of things is a no no no. Political parties pride themselves as mass mobilisers of people and in this country, I’m sure NDC and NPP can boast of about half the number of people that go to the polls.”
”It is not in the place of citizens to contribute towards a party but its members. If the party while in power had contributed to the 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.”
Mr. Franklin Cudjoe indicated that he truly understands and supports John Mahama on his call for political campaign reforms, he however has reservations.
“In fact, the only part I support is the crowd-funding as it will eliminate situations where political parties owe big wigs who fund them.”
Mr. Mahama during a public lecture on March 22, at UPSA auditorium in Accra said viable political parties play a strong role 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 is now broke and therefore financing political campaigns going into the 2024 general elections is not an option.
He recommended that public funding of political parties be scaled up in the future supervised by an independent and credible institution to ensure fairness in the sharing formula.