President of policy think tank IMANI, Franklin Cudjoe, has said President John Dramani Mahama’s ‘Accounting to the People tour’, was initiated based on their assessment of the National Democratic Congress’ (NDC) manifesto in 2015.
President John Dramani Mahama is currently embarking on what he calls ‘Accounting to the people tour’ in a bid to recount to Ghanaians the projects initiated by his government within the last three years.
The tour has largely been described by critics as an abuse of incumbency through the use of state resources to favour the President in the November polls.
Others have also described the tour as shallow lacking the real tenets of accountability and transparency. Commenting on the tour, IMANI Ghana said in July 2015, it assessed the promises made in the NDC’s 2012 manifesto which according to them, had about 540 promises.
[contextly_sidebar id=”psHYMVHySljxWBvCKNlvYSlmIH5YiWCl”]The policy think tank then graded the promises fulfilled by the NDC government as at 2015 at 47%.
In education, IMANI Ghana gave the government an overall score of 65.7%.
Speaking on Citi FM’s news analysis programme The Big Issue on Saturday, Franklin Cudjoe said he was elated that the NDC government is exhibiting its projects based on their report.
“Every government would like to showcase what they’ve tried to do especially in an election year; but it is important that the very thing that they said they will do is what they should be held to account. I was quite elated and I still maintained that the NDC took significant lessons from our manifesto assessment and decided to do accounting to the people in a midterm. Usually you don’t find that with political groupings,” he added.
Assessment of 540 promises
On the promises made in the NDC manifesto, Mr. Cudjoe noted that out of the 540 promises “only seven of the promises are having some form of a metric.”
“We’ve been combing through the manifesto, we found out over 500 promises with only seven of the promises that are having some form of a metric. Thankfully about four of them were in the arena of the economy and the first one was single digit inflation throughout every year, an 8% annual GDP,” he said.
The single inflation rate, according to Mr. Cudjoe, “obviously hasn’t materialized.”
He added “the 8% GDP growth hasn’t also materialized and there was a budget deficit figure also in the realm of single digit which has also not materialized.”
“I’m not sure that the economy is not significantly forging ahead that the party would like to put forward,” he added.
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By: Godwin A. Allotey/citifmonline.com/Ghana
Follow @AlloteyGodwin