The IMANI Centre for Policy Education (CPE) has highlighted that most promises in the manifestos of three political groups in Ghana are vague and lack measurable specifics.
These groups include the New Patriotic Party (NPP), the National Democratic Congress (NDC), and the Movement for Change (M4C).
Senior Research Associate Dennis Asare f disclosed this during an event on November 5 to present the findings of their report, known as IMANIfesto.
“IMANIfesto as we call it, reminds the people of Ghana that the power to hold the government accountable is in their hands. Through a three-prong process of evaluating financial viability of each promise, its potential impact on private sector development, and overall policy implications of its implementation, we launch a thoroughly examined report of manifestos put forth by the New Patriotic Party (NPP), the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the Movement for Change,” Mr Asare explained.
The parties were selected based on their performance in IMANI’s Public Understanding and Literacy for Sentiment and Election (PULSE) analysis tool, which evaluates public sentiment about candidates and political parties across social and traditional media.
“And we chose these political parties because, at the start of this exercise, these were the ones that had launched their manifestos,” he said.
The exercise focused primarily on “The Economy: Assessing proposed economic policies and their potential impact on Ghana’s growth and development, Governance: Evaluating commitments to governance reforms, transparency, and accountability etc., Energy and Infrastructure: Analyzing the feasibility of energy policies and infrastructure development plans, and Education and Social Services: Reviewing plans for improving education and social services, and their alignment with the needs of Ghanaians”.
He explained that the report categorizes the promises into three groups: quantifiable, semi-quantifiable, and non-quantifiable.
“Some of the promises are really quantifiable, you can really see what the parties want to do. Some are semi-quantifiable, something needs to happen before what they are promising will happen, and some are just vague, not quantifiable. You don’t specifically see what the political parties want to achieve,” Mr Asare highlighted.
“In the case of the NPP you can count about 574 promises…you will see that there are more non-quantifiable promises in that manifesto. So, there are more vague promises. If you go to the NDC manifesto, there are about 851 promises… you see a lot more non-quantifiable promises which show more vague promises. Now you look at Movement for Change, same, a lot more of non-quantifiable promises.
“So, what we are saying is that most of the promises by these political parties in their manifestoes are vague. You can’t really see the specific services that they want to offer. So, in case any of them is elected, it is very difficult to hold them accountable,” Mr Asare emphasized.
He added that “the manifestos are overly ambitious and there are no costs to the promises”.