We're not into anti-government hatchet jobs – IMANI

Policy think tank Imani Africa has said it has never been influenced or paid by unseen hands to wage disaffection wars against governments.

Its Vice-President, Mr Kofi Bentil, told Felicity Naana Nelson on the maiden edition of Class91.3FM’s Straight Talk on Thursday, 16 May 2019 that anybody who holds a view to the contrary should prove same.

“We've been doing this for almost 20 years and I dare anybody to come and give me any proof that anybody pays us to do anything.

“Our job is to shine the light, our job is to ask questions, our job is to force our leaders to give us answers”, Mr Bentil told Felicity Nelson, adding: “Sometimes those answers are not satisfactory, and if they are not satisfactory, we can choose to go to court, we can choose to force them to do more and that is what we did with the Kelni GVG deal. And when we went to court, we forced them to do certain things.”

Mr Bentil, who is a private legal practitioner, noted that officials at Imani Africa do not regard themselves as experts on issues bordering on national development but rather see themselves as citizens who ask duty bearers critical questions to ensure the overall wellbeing of all Ghanaians and others residing in the country.

“I don’t think that those who complain about the fact that we speak about almost everything really take some cognisance of what we say. You have a problem with the fact that I can do too many things but your problem should not be that I can do so many things, your problem should be whether I do them well.

“So, I challenge anybody to pick on any issue that we decided to pick on and then go into the merits of what we have done and then question us on those merits. You should not have a problem that we pick on a wide array of issues. We make it clear that we don’t call ourselves experts. We do that deliberately. There is a lot of expertise in Imani but we chose not to call ourselves so because most of the problems in Ghana do not require even experts’ treatments. They are simple.

“We call ourselves citizens and we occupy the office of the citizen. Our Constitution gives us every right to question. In our case, before we ask those questions, we do quite a lot of work and when we ask those questions, we insist on getting the answers and we push back if we don’t get the answers.”