Most of manifesto promises by NDC, NPP and M4C are vague – IMANIfesto report

The IMANI Centre for Policy Education (CPE) has revealed that most of the promises contained in the manifestos of three political groupings in Ghana, are vague, thus non-quantifiable.The political groupings are; the New Patriotic Party (NPP), National Democratic Congress (NDC) and Movement for Change (M4C).This was disclosed by a Senior Research Associate at IMANI Centre for Policy and Education, Dennis Asare at an event to disseminate content of a report they call IMANIfesto on November 5."IMANIfesto as we call it, remind the people of Ghana that the power to hold the government accountable is in their hands.

Through a three-prong process of evaluating financial viability of each promise, its potential impact on private sector development, and overall policy implications of its implementation, we launch a thoroughly examined report of manifestos put forth by the New Patriotic Party (NPP), the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the Movement for Change," Mr Asare explained.The parties were chosen based on their performance on the IMANI Public Understanding and Literacy for Sentiment and Election (PULSE) analysis tool, which measures public sentiments about the candidates and political parties on social and traditional media."And we chose these political parties because, at the start of this exercise, these were the ones that had launched their manifestos," he said.The exercise focused primarily on "The Economy: Assessing proposed economic policies and their potential impact on Ghana's growth and development, Governance: Evaluating commitments to governance reforms, transparency, and accountability etc., Energy and Infrastructure: Analyzing the feasibility of energy policies and infrastructure development plans, and Education and Social Services: Reviewing plans for improving education and social services, and their alignment with the needs of Ghanaians."According to him, the report categorised the various promises as quantifiable, semi-quantifiable and non-quantifiable."Some of the promises are really quantifiable, you can really see what the parties want to do.

Some are semi-quantifiable, something needs to happen before what they are promising will happen, and some are just vague, not quantifiable.

You don't specifically see what the political parties want to achieve," Mr Asare noted."In the case of the NPP you can count about 574 promises…you will see that there are more non-quantifiable promises in that manifesto.