‘Quit campaigning with state money’ - Lecturer

Political parties must stop using state resources to finance their activities when they are voted into office, a lecturer at the Finance Department of the University of Ghana Business School (UGBS), Dr Lord Mensah, has cautioned.

Dr Mensah argued that political parties needed to make public their sources of funding and stop diverting state money into their coffers if the country is to make positive strides.

In an interview with Prince Minkah on the Executive Breakfast Show on Monday May 16, 2016, he lamented the practice of leaders inflating the cost of projects in order to use part of the money to defray their expenses incurred during the electioneering prior to being elected into office.

To him, the country loses huge amounts of resources due to the practice and poses several problems for the country, leading to underdevelopment.

He called for immediate attention to the problem, while advocating an end to such bad decisions by politicians.

“The politicians or people aspiring to be the managers of this economy should be able to declare their source of finance because all these problems we are having in this country, where projects are not going to where they are supposed to be and projects that are not needed going to other places, [they] all boil down to the source of finance where political parties get into power and it is a sort of payback time to engage in projects where you can underestimate or overestimate to make your profits to recoup whatever you invested in the party during campaign time,” he explained.

He said it would be a key metric that will inform the decision of the electorate as the country heads into elections on November 7.