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.
