The Ghana Anti-Corruption Coalition (GACC), in collaboration with the Ghana Integrity Initiative and ACEP, is implementing a project dubbed: “Safeguarding Ghana’s Stability in the Face of Serious and Organized Crime Threats during the 2024 Elections”.
The project is to create awareness about the challenges posed by electoral corruption and serious crimes.
Ms Beauty Emefa Nartey, the Executive Secretary of GACC, who made this known to the Ghana News Agency (GNA) in Takoradi, indicated that vote buying marred the cherished democratic credentials of the state.
“Notwithstanding the modest progress in electoral politics, issues of abuse of office, misuse of state resources, election related corruption, vote buying… had the propensity to mar the future of not only the development of the human and social-economic capital but the cherished democratic credentials of the state,” Ms Nartey said.
“Transactional elections – vote buying by political parties is becoming a security issue and a means for economic organized crime to thrive.”
“It is believed that high-profile social influencers invest their ill-earned monies in the process to protect their crimes aside engendering the political space and sustainable development”.
Ms Nartey said the cost of elections in Ghana was becoming very expensive requiring a candidate to invest thousands of cedis even at the primaries levels and thus promoting monetization.
The goal of GACC was to, among other things, create awareness on “Safeguarding Ghana’s Stability in the Face of Serious and Organized Crime Threats during the 2024 elections,” she said.
The project would educate the public on the need to reject monetization of the electoral processes, which continued to negatively affect the progress of society.
“Voting for the candidate with the highest bid to win, often times deprived the constituents the space for fair competition, competence as against affluence, self-promotion as against patriotism.”
She said the likelihood of the political class to overspend in the 2024 elections must be a matter of concern to all Ghanaians, adding that it was very important that Ghanaians rose against the practice and support the advocacy to stem it.
“We are the very people who pay in disguise with the lack of proper roads, hospitals, schools and better working conditions in the long round,” the GACC Boss said.
She, therefore, requested that political parties made the public aware of their sources of funding for their political activities to ensure that the modest gains made in the country’s democratic process were safeguarded.
