CDD responds to accusations of bias by smaller parties in pre-election survey

The Centre for Democratic Development Ghana (CDD-Ghana) has defended the content of a pre-election survey it released over the past week to give a forecast of the overall preparedness of stakeholders for the upcoming polls.

This follows concerns raised by some smaller parties as regards their exclusion from the survey.

Per details of the survey, the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) placed higher over the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) in terms of public confidence in the ability to deliver on campaign promises.

However, questions were raised by some smaller parties as to why they were ignored and not included in the pre-election survey.

One of such critic is the leader and founder of the All People’s Congress (APC) Hassan Ayariga who accused CDD-Ghana of releasing a rather disgraceful report which only gave visibility to only the two major parties.

He is quoted to have said in an interaction with Starr News “I think that they themselves have not been truthful to themselves and the rest of the political parties. To believe that they are promoting the agenda of the NPP and the NDC is sad and it is unfortunate. Because you see when you research on two political parties you will get the response of the two but if you expand it to cover others you will get a better response.”

But responding to this at the launch of a report on the assessment of political parties’ manifestos ahead of the polls, November 9, Dr Kojo Asante, Director of Advocacy and Public Engagement at CDD indicated at the time the pre-election survey commenced none of the smaller parties had put out their manifestos.

He also noted that time and resource constraint contributed to their focus on the two major parties.

In an exclusive interaction with GhanaWeb, Dr Asante said “we had to make a judgement call because of limited resources, time…to try to focus on the manifestos that had been developed. Even at the time I think they were the only two parties that had put manifestos out.”

According to Dr Asante, in subsequent surveys the CDD will put more measures in place to ensure that more parties are included in the survey.

“I think going forward there has to be a way which we select from the myriad of minority parties…but we see this as a start…” Dr Asante said.