Parties Adopt New Code of Conduct

Posted on: www.dailyguideghana.com

By William Yaw Owusu

Thursday October 13, 2011.
The major political parties in the country with technical support from the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) yesterday finalized the much-awaited political parties’ code of conduct that would regulate their activities in the upcoming 2012 general elections.

The final workshop to shape the draft code was attended by high-profile members of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), New Patriotic Party (NPP), Convention Peoples Party (CPP), Peoples National Convention (PNC).

The rest were Great Consolidated Peoples Party (GCPP), the EAGLE Party with the Electoral Commission (EC) and the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE) in attendance as observers.

Concluding the code, Dr. Michael Ofori-Mensah, a policy analyst of the IEA said all the parties had all expressed concern about the way and manner certain provisions in the code of conduct is persistently abused and have pledged to make it work this time around.

“One key issue participants agreed on was the need to strengthen the enforcement mechanisms envisaged in the code in order to make its provisions more meaningful,” he said.

He said the code of conduct bears the hallmark of cross-party efforts and provides strong evidence of the political leaders’ capability to rise above partisan lines and work towards what he called “a congenial democratic system in our country.”

Dr. Ofori-Mensah said the code of conduct which is expected to serve as guide in the 2012 elections should be disseminated to the public to get the electorate to appreciate the effort to consolidate the democratic dispensation adding “it is the IEA’s hope that strong efforts will be made to conform to the code in order to maintain our hard-earned reputation as a model of good governance and democracy.”

Later in an interview, Jake Obetsebi-Lamptey, National Chairman of the NPP said the political parties flout the code of conduct because the enforcement has always been very weak.

He said “today we are in power, tomorrow we are in opposition but all we need to realize is that these are strings in political life of which we need a set of rules so we can all live with no matter where we find ourselves.”

He said “if we have to legislate the code then we should particularly look out for the ones that are breached at will so that we can make appropriate laws that can be more easily applied.”

“It is up to the political parties to generate the necessary goodwill for the code to be enforceable and workable. If that is done it makes politics better and I hope we will all be able to enforce the codes we set for ourselves,” he added.

“This is a competition of ideas, plans, vision and once we can actually get the debate onto that level and move away from just abuse it is going to help our course.”
Johnson Asiedu-Nketia, aka General Mosquito, General Secretary of the NDC said once the political parties have adopted the code they should be able to abide by it.

“We have tried to shape it so that we can all live by it. We have discussed it in an atmosphere of cordiality and transparency and I believe there would not be any difficulty in adopting it.”

He described the effort put in finalizing the code as “a learning process” saying “I think that we are progressing since we do not expect to achieve results overnight.

When you look at our democratic development there are improvements as we move along and so I want to believe that the conduct of parties in the upcoming election will be an improvement over the ones we have had over the years.”