State funding of political parties-It's Not The Answer

Front page
March 11, 2008

A Ghanaian political scientist, Prof Emmanuel Gyimah-Boadi, has stated that the suggestion to dedicate a certain percentage of taxes to fund political parties should be carefully thought through because other constitutional bodies equally need funding.
“Will this mean that we raise additional taxes or we annex a percentage of the existing tax revenue? Will that come at the expense of other public goods that are funded from tax revenue, such as the school feeding programme, the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) programme or the Northern Development Fund?” he asked in an interview with the Daily Graphic yesterday.
According to him, Ghanaians must be careful not to set up a chain reaction in which a percentage of tax revenue would be specifically attached to a long list of equally important public goods.
Prof Gyimah-Boadi, a Political Science Professor at the University of Ghana, Legon, and Executive Director of the Ghana Centre for Democratic Development (CDD - Ghana), was reacting to proposals made by four political parties and the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) that the state should fund political parties.
The New Patriotic Party (NPP), the National Democratic Congress (NDC), the Convention People’s Party (CPP) and the People’s National Convention (PNC), under the umbrella of the Ghana Political Parties Programme (GPPP) and the IEA, are expected to launch the proposal for state funding of political parties tomorrow.
Prof Gyimah-Boadi noted that there were fundamental issues to consider in order to place the idea of state funding of political parties in a proper perspective, adding that there was a general problem of unfunded mandates “in our current democratic governance arrangements”.
He said the 1992 Constitution imposed significant obligations on political parties to undertake key democratic governance functions but made no clear provisions for their financing.
Prof Gyimah-Boadi noted that political parties shared that predicament with other public and quasi-public agencies such as the media, adding that the media were also assigned a crucial role in democratic governance in the Fourth Republic “but without a clear idea of its funding”.
“We must take together the challenge of how to fund Ghanaian political parties, the media, civil society and all other key agencies that are crucial to the effective functioning of our system of democratic governance,” he emphasised.
Another difficult challenge, he said, was the chronic weakness experienced by key constitutional bodies such as the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ), the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE), Parliament, the Judiciary, among other bodies.
Prof Gyimah-Boadi indicated that those bodies were explicitly mandated to charge their expenditure to the Consolidated Fund but suffered “chronic lack of funding”.
He said the Electoral Commission had suffered the same fate and, “like the others, it has typically depended substantially on foreign donors”.
“At the very least, we must come up with a credible formula for funding these constitutional bodies,” he suggested, and said there was the need to find creative ways of addressing the challenge of funding political parties and in a manner that was also sustainable.
He described the issue of state funding of political parties as a great idea because it was essential for sustained multi-party democracy.
“As an ardent advocate of democracy and democratic governance, I fully support it in principle and would want to see it in practice,” he stated.
He welcomed the draft legislation which was seeking to provide a legal basis and framework for the funding of political parties, adding, “We welcome and await the tabling of this draft legislation in Parliament so that we and the members of the public can have the opportunity to review it, make inputs into it and hopefully help to render the legislation fully credible and implementable.”