Party financiers sponsoring vigilante groups – Akwetey

Individuals who sponsor political parties also fund vigilante groups affiliated to those parties, and that trend is worrying, Executive Director of the Institute of Democratic Governance (IDEG), Dr Emmanuel Akwetey, has said.

He has expressed concerns about the failure of political parties in the country to make known their fund-raising processes, as stipulated by the statutes of the Electoral Commission (EC), adding that bankrollers are fond of providing financial support to vigilantes, making it difficult to fight them.

Dr Akwetey, who was a guest on Class91.3FM’s Executive Breakfast Show on Monday, 25 June 2018, stressed that: “… It is the financiers who are now financing political vigilantes and they seem to wield unfettered power. They can speak by heart, threaten anybody and nobody can go close to them”.

According to him, sponsorship of political parties “in all democracies is taken seriously and it is probed because he who pays the piper calls the tune”.

Dr Akwetey told sit-in host Benjamin Akakpo that this “is one of the areas where there is no scrutiny and there is no regulation, there is no sanction, there is nothing and we don’t even know where these monies come from”

According to him, although citizens who vote for the parties to come to power, think those governments must listen to their concerns and address them, the reality is that those governments are controlled by the financiers.

Dr Akwetey said it is “time to question our democracy and interrogate what the country’s multi-party system has evolved into”, and address the challenges accordingly.