Investigations conducted by the Ghana News Agency (GNA) on Friday uncovered that fake copies of manifestos of the two major political parties, the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the New Patriotic Party (NPP) are on sale at GHc5 a piece.
The fake documents are being sold along some principal streets in Accra and contain just a few of the two parties’ policies and programmes as captured in their original manifesto documents, even though it is not the abridged version. Compared to the original manifestos the fake ones also skipped important information which the parties were putting across to the Ghanaian electorate in order to win their votes.
Whereas the original NDC manifesto begins with President John Dramani Mahama’s forward, an Executive summary and a table of content, the fake one starts with a brief summary of events during the launch of the manifesto on October 4, 2012, and comes without any table of content.
The original NPP manifesto also starts with a statement from Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, Presidential Candidate of the party, and an executive summary, but GNA discovered that in the fake one all this vital information is missing.
The themes of the manifestos are also missing in the fake manifesto. For instance, in the area of corruption, it failed to highlight the NPP’s programmes and policies to curb corruption in the event that it wins political power on December 7.
The fake NDC manifesto faintly captured topics such as: “our 2008 manifesto achievement in education, health for all, pension for a decent retirement, harmonized social protection, the aged, women’s empowerment, child labour and street children, youth development sports development, comprehensive poverty reduction, savannah accelerated development, and citizen monitoring of performance of social impact, among others.
The original NDC version covered topics such as how the party intended to build “a strong and resilient economy, maintaining robust macro-economic fundamentals monetary policy, fiscal policy, agricultural modernization, fisheries, staple crops, cash crops, other cash crops, irrigation, agricultural mechanization, poultry and livestock.
“Seed production, agriculture finance, research, extension services and agriculture education, the private sector is key land: the economic basis, our forests are endangered, mining for national development, manufacturing: adding value to our raw materials. Industrialization: building on our oil wealth oil and gas and natural resources, working for happiness training and capacity building, job creation, tourism and the creative industry, tourism, the creative industry, putting people first, education:
The original version of the NPP manifesto promises to introduce reforms in institutions that deal with corruption and strengthened the asset declaration regime as well as other institutional initiatives such as legislative reforms to fight corruption in the country but they were all missing in the fake manifesto.
The GNA further discovered that in the original version of the NPP manifesto, every chapter ends with an important quotation from former President John Agyekum Kufuor or Nana Addo Dankwa-Akufo Addo, the party’s Presidential Candidate for the December general election, but which were not captured in the fake one.
When contacted by the GNA, both the NDC and NPP said they were not aware of the piracy and expressed their determination to conduct their own investigations into the issue.
