‘There’s danger ahead’ – Afriyie Ankrah warns politicians

Former Youth and Sports Minister Elvis Afriyie Ankrah says Ghana will soon be hit by major youth uprising if the political parties do not minimize the influence of money in their internal elections.

Speaking at an IDEG forum on development and political parties in Ghana on Wednesday warned that majority of the youth who are unemployed are contemplating revolting over continuous doling of cash by the political elites during electioneering.

“There’s danger ahead. Danger!” he said adding: “If you go around towns and you listen to the vibes, it is not very comfortable. If you listen carefully they are not happy with the government but then they say all of you [politicians] are not correct, you’re all the same.

“So, there’s danger and if you look at graduate unemployment, you saw what happened at KNUST, you saw what happened at Adentan, the power of social media, easy access to information or misinformation and the ability to mobilise large numbers of people within a very short time, we need to be very careful,” he warned.

He continued: “So when people see us in the midst of all that spending so much money...and if we do not voluntarily but urgently engage in reforms we may experience a serious backlash from the public in the not too distant future.”

Senior Research fellow at IDEG, Professor Ransford Gyampo on his part called for a proper regulatory framework to check political parties from charging exorbitant fees at during internal elections.

He said: “Who determines how much a political party can inflict on its people? There should be a regulator. Political parties operate as if nobody controls them. They cannot be development neither can they advance the course of democracy if they operate without control.”

Also speaking at the forum was Vice president of IMANI Kofi Bentil, who blamed the EC for failing to enforce the political parties’ law.

He thus called on the “EC to simply do what the law says it should do because it has not come to tell us that it cannot do it.”