A senior lecturer with the Political Science department at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Dr. Richard Baah Amoako, has asked politicians to be truthful to Ghanaians when soliciting for votes.
He says campaign promises have been too utopian, something politicians come back and comment otherwise on when they are not able to fulfill after winning an election.
According to him, Ghana is battling so much with debt to the extent that it cannot even defray its interests. However, the political analyst is troubled that politicians, knowing the situation at hand, keep making unrealistic promises and comes back to say things are not the way they predicted.
“Manifestoes have become a tradition. The fact is that manifestoes have so many deficiencies. How do you want to pencil things and later tell us they didn’t know what is in there?
“We should suspend the manifestoes so that after winning, then you come to tell us what you have seen, what is really in there. It is not very important anymore in Ghanaian politics. I won’t say it is not relevant but it is becoming irrelevant,” he told Captain Smart on Onua TV Sunday, August 18, 2024, during the live telecast of the New Patriotic Party’s manifesto launch in Takoradi.
He added that, what a party wants to do for a country should be an assembly of reasonable men assessing the various aspects of the economy with recourse to available resources to proffer solutions to what can be done to ameliorate those challenges.
To him, ruling a nation should go beyond one person making unrealistic promises to the people.
“It is not about the flag bearer coming to tell us this and that. It should be a gathering of reasonable men discussing real issues affecting the country. They speak as if they are sitting on some wealth. Meanwhile, we are on debt and we can’t even pay our debt and interest on it. Then later they will tell us it is not them.
“Tell us the truth if you know you can’t do it. They make promises as if they are going to do it with their own money. One person becomes a dictator and tells us what he wants us to do. It is what is pertinent that is what is needed and not what you want,” the former aspirant of NPP National Chairman intimated.
Manifestoes are becoming irrelevant in Ghanaian politics – Amoako Baah
