By Mildred Siabi-Mensah
Sekondi, Feb. 21, GNA – The leadership of the Ghana Anti-Corruption Coalition (GACC) has described serious economic organised crimes as a key destructive force to the rapid development of the Country.
They stated that illegal mining, drug peddling, investment in political party activities, prohibited cyber activities, kidnapping, money laundering was planned and committed at the expense of the country’s rapid socio-economic development.
Ms Beauty Emefa Narteh, the Executive Director of the Ghana Anti-Corruption Coalition, told the Ghana News Agency in an interview that another critical and emerging crime was vote buying by parties to win power.
She said, “transactional elections” that is, vote buying by political parties in an electioneering process, was becoming a security issue and a means for economic organised crime to thrive since such high-profile social influencers invest their monies in the process to protect their crimes aside engendering the political space and sustainable development.
The GACC Boss said the cost of elections in the country was becoming very expensive everyday costing a candidate not less than $85, 000 to contest for a party primary adding, “where are they getting the monies from, why do you pay people to vote for you, we are promoting monetization”.
“Now people have to pay people to vote for them and thus limiting the space for fair competition, intelligence against monies, patriotism against self-aggrandizement which should be a worry to most Ghanaian as election 2024 approaches,” she noted.
Though the political party Act, Act 2000, prohibits vote buying, it is a common practice in the political landscape of the country from the primary school elections through to national political party activities.
Ms Narteh therefore requested that political parties inform the public of the sources of funding for their political activities to ensure that the modest gains in the country’s democracy were safeguarded.
Despite the modest progress in electoral politics, issues of abuse of office, misuse of state resources, election related corruption-vote buying, and threats have the propensity to mar the future of not only the development of the human and social-economic capital but the very democracy that the forefathers envisioned for the state.
Ms Narteh said, the GACC, in consortium with the Ghana Integrity Initiative, ACEP with supports from Commonwealth and Development partners had therefore initiated the “Safeguarding Ghana’s Stability in the Face of Serious and Organized Crime Threats during the
2024 elections” to create awareness about the challenges posed by electoral corruption and serious crimes.
She said, the likelihood of the political class to overspend in the 2024 elections must be a matter of concern to all Ghanaians adding, it was very important that Ghanaians rose against the practice and support the advocacy to stem the practice in the tide, “we are the very people who pay in disguise with the lack of proper roads, hospitals, schools and better working conditions.”
In a related development, Mr. Samuel Appiah Darko, the Director for Strategy, Research and Communication at the Office of the Special Prosecutor has urged Ghanaians to hate corruption with the same level of Hatred towards LGBTC+.
He said, in many countries, and in line with the United Nations requirement, the Office of the OSP had been created to help sanitize the economic and social space and called on Ghanaians to report such ill actions in society to the OSP for investigation.
GNA