EC To Track Source Of Funding For Political Parties

The Electoral Commission is working on a Constitutional Instrument (CI) which will enable it to track how political parties are funded.

This Chairperson, Jean Mensa, said will allow the political parties to properly account for the source of their funding and how they use it.

There is a widely held perception that political parties appropriate public resources to fund their political activities since the sources of their funding are unknown and undisclosed.

Experts have said political parties also tend to raise resources through fair or foul means for their electioneering campaign and attempt to recoup such resources after elections, thereby depleting the nation’s coffers.

Last year, a report by the Ghana Centre for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana) and the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD) estimated a 59% rise in campaign expenditure.

The report stressed that “Measures are needed to strengthen and better enforce existing party financing regulation as set out in Article 55 (14-25) of the 1992 Constitution and to continuously improve citizen understandings of electoral politics.”

Now, the EC is doing just that.

Mrs Mensa said measures have already been put in place to streamline the activities of the parties to ensure that they are conforming with the law.

“These are issues that have haunted the Commission…we have 24 political parties on our register but you hardly find them adhering to basic expectations within the law so we are looking at audits and get quite a number of them to provide their audit reports.

“We realise that the format in which most of the reports are presented cannot be compared to best international standards so we are working to develop a CI within to regulate the activities…a CI that will provide a basic template to political parties to follow and therefore you can track funding and they can account for their funds,” she added when she paid a courtesy call on the Multimedia Group on Tuesday.