Lack of capacity hinders parties to submit accounts — Jonah

A Research Fellow at the Institute of Democratic Governance (DIEGO), Mr Kwesi Jonah, has attributed the inability of some political parties to submit their yearly audited accounts to the Electoral Commission (EC) to lack of capacity to carry out such a constitutional requirement.
Consequently, he has called for public support to the political parties to build their capacities to meet their constitutional demands.
Such support, he pointed out, would include beefing up their regional and constituency secretariats with qualified people, including accountants, to enable them to discharge their responsibilities dutifully.
Mr Jonah, who is also a Political Science lecturer at the University of Ghana, Legon, was commenting on recent reports by the Daily Graphic that only three out of the 10 registered political parties since 2000 were able to file their returns and statements of account for 2006 at the ECDocuments made available to the Daily Graphic by the Director of Finance at the EC, Mr I. K. Boateng, showed that as of December 31, 2006, only the New Patriotic Party (NPP), the Democratic People’s Party (DPP) and the Convention People’s Party (CPP) had submitted their audited accounts to the EC, in compliance with the Political Parties Act.
The National Democratic Congress (NDC), the People’s National Convention (PNC), the Great Consolidated Popular Party (GCPP), EGLE and the National Reform Party (NRP), however, failed to honour the constitutional obligation for 2006.
Mr Jonah explained that because the parties had not been able to acquire the services of trained financial staff to collect and collate such information and process it into an audited accounts from their various constituencies and regional to the national levels had always been a problem.
He said another reason that could be attributed to the inability of the parties to submit their audited accounts was that most of the 10 political parties mentioned only existed on paper.
He mentioned the National Reform Party (NRP), the United Ghana Movement (UGM) and EGLE as some of the parties that “do exist only technically”.
He also explained that some of the parties failed to submit their audited accounts because they might have solicited support from sources that were in gross violation of the nation’s laws.
Mr Jonah said the political parties had not violated only the law on the submission of their audited accounts to the EC but many of the conditions contained in the Political Parties Act 2000, which included having branches in all the regions, as well as having offices in not less than two-thirds of the districts in each region.
He also noted that although one political party might fulfil one of the demands, others might have satisfied other demands.
He gave the example of the DPP fulfilling the demand for the submission of audited accounts, while the NDC might have met the condition of having offices in two-thirds of the districts in everyregion.