Laws on political party funding too vague - Asiedu Nketia

Mr Johnson Asiedu Nketia, General Secretary of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), has described the country’s laws on political party financing and campaigning as vague and called for it to be strengthened.

He said the laws must be expanded to set limit of funding for every parliamentary candidate during an election and also demand that they declared their sources of funding.

“The campaign financing laws must be specific as to which activities can be financed, how much to spend on each activity and must make it mandatory for candidates to disclose their sources of funding”, he said.

Additionally, he said, the assets declaration laws are a “useless ritual” without any proper significance and called for its review.

Mr Asiedu Nketia made the call at Winneba on Tuesday when he took his turn to address the 38th anniversary of the 31st December Revolution on the theme, “Monetization of Elections in Ghana: ‘A threat to National Development and Genuine Democracy”.

He also called for a second look at the chunk of money spent on internal elections of political parties saying sufficient budget must be made available to the Electoral Commission (EC) to organise and supervise such elections.

This, he said, would stop political parties from charging filing fees from aspirants to help reduce the cost of seeking political position and ultimately reduce corruption and the monetization in the body politic of the country which had made politics very expensive.

Brigadier General Nunoo Mensah, former Chief of Defense Staff, said politics was not a business venture which politicians could use to enrich themselves, but an avenue for decent people who have genuine desire and the calling to serve their people in order to improve their quality of life.

Regrettably, he said, the very ills of corruption, bad governance, mismanagement, gross indiscipline among others which the revolution was against continued unabated.

He called for a new national movement which would inculcate the ideals and values of the 31st December Revolution into Ghanaians in order to be able to bring about the desired change to build a genuine democracy.