The governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) is better at achieving its campaign promises than their predecessors, the National Democratic Congress (NDC), policy think tank, IMANI Africa, has shown in two IMANIFesto reports.
The two reports in 2015 and 2019 looked at the performance of the Mahama and Akufo-Addo administrations separately, concerning their promises. IMANI analysed the promises when the two parties were in their third year in office. While the NDC made 540 promises, the NPP’s promises were 510.
IMANIFesto is a framework that assesses political parties’ manifestos using a coding system comprised of quantitative indicators.
The first edition was released in 2015 during the tenure of former President John Dramani Mahama and the second was launched on Wednesday, to assess the performance of the Akufo-Addo-led administration.
While the NDC had an overall score of 47 per cent, the NPP accumulated 48 per cent, a one percentage point better than their political rivals. Both scores are regarded as “satisfactory progress” even though they remain “weak” scores.
Commenting on the development, Head of Research of IMANI Africa, Patrick Stephenson told TheGhanaReport.Com: “It looks as if the NPP is better off in terms of absolute score, compared to the NDC in terms of the percentage of the execution of the promises”.
The NDC lost in the 2016 elections to the NPP a year after the release of the report.
Having recorded improved economic metrics in the last few years, the NPP leads the NDC 54.35 per cent to 36.40 per cent on the performance of the economy.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicted Ghana to be one of the fastest-growing economies in the world by the end of 2019.
The NPP also outstripped the record of the NDC on governance by 46.21per cent to 43 per cent. B
The info graph below shows the measurement of governance promises by the two parties.
NDC NPP
On the other hand, the NDC outperformed better than the NPP on infrastructure recording a significant 51.36 per cent over their opponents who managed 46.44 per cent. The NDC which prides itself as a socialist party beat their opponents by 49 per cent to 43.78 per cent on social services.
On energy, the 2015 IMANIFesto report explained that the pivotal promise of the NDC was to bring to an end the problem of infrequent power supply also known as ‘dumsor’ by the end of 2013.
This promise was not achieved as the load shedding programme was still ongoing at the time of the compilation of the 2015 report.
The load-shedding bite hard on the country’s economy with the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER) estimating that some 885 manufacturing firms in Ghana lost a total of GH¢250million between 2012 and 2012.
During the period, 285 firms closed down, resulting in the loss of over 5,000 jobs, the ISSER data suggests.
Also, the Mahama administration’s promise to increase installed power generation capacity from 2,443 in 2012 to 5,000 megawatts by 2016 had seen only 16 per cent completion progress by 2015.
The NPP government, however, scored 43.78 per cent for achieving some of its promises on energy sector infrastructure in the latest report.
IMANI said in 2015 that an examination of the implementation of pledges by the NDC in its 2012 manifesto concerning education resulted in a score of 65.7 per cent. The think tank interpreted it as good progress within the IMANIFesto framework.
Having managed to roll out it’s main Free Senior High School (SHS) policy, the 2019 report captures its assessment of education under education infrastructure and human capital investment. While infrastructure got a mark of 25 per cent human capital investment received 42.5 per cent grading.