The Deafening Silence Of The EC On The Bloated Register Is Worrying
In our relentless efforts to ensure violence-free polls in elections 2016, the onus lies with Ghana's Electoral Commission to adopt measures which would not seem to be skewed towards one particular party or the other but those that would be in the supreme interest of Ghanaians as a whole.
Though the EC has assembled a team of technocrats and stakeholders in our political space to have a second look at our electoral system, one key ingredient seems to have been dwarfed to the sidelines, an ingredient many consider to be a prerequisite for free, fair and transparent elections going into 2016.
Various attempts have been and are being made to discount the bullet-proof assertion that our electoral register is beyond normalcy when juxtaposed with the country's overall population.
United for Change Movement has severally provided facts cast in stone to buttress the claims that our register is second to none when it comes to countries with questionable electoral registers. Ideally, a country's electoral population should not exceed 50% of the entire population, but ours, much to our consternation, is close to 53%.
We find this rare development highly untenable. Mr.Amadu Sule, the deputy chairman of the Electoral Commission, cited outrageous examples to sort of justify Ghana's exemplary scenario. Charity, they say, begins at home, but Mr. Sule overlooked African examples by feasting his blurred eyes on a country thousands of miles away from the African continent. We find that rather baffling.
Ladies and gentlemen, is it not amazing that some constituencies boast of voting populations in the regions of 70%, 80%, 90%, and 102% as against their entire population? We have been groping for understanding how we have all these strange figures in our register, but our Electoral Commission seems to dwell in wonderland, as though these numerous complaints do not hold water.
The notion that the Kwadwo Afari Djan led-EC is sacrosanct has been defeated by the Supreme Court's ruling recently, cancelling the planned district assembly elections. In effect, the Electoral Commission with its commissioners should listen to the voices of the masses.
In a sharp contrast to his widely publicized views and defence of this bloated register brouhaha, Amadu Sule, on TV3, announced the EC had been able to fish out over 70,000 people who registered more than once. This announcement lends credence to our wildly-held view that Ghana's electoral register is overbloated.
United for Change Movement, in our continuous efforts to ensure absolute sanity in our electoral system, would like to remind all civil society and religious organizations to join us in our chorus to let the EC know that disaster looms large if the current register is not modified.
The EC's penchant of regarding this unpretentious call for a new register to be compiled with unaffected disdain is distasteful, and must cease immediately.
Events which visited the 2012 elections pour uneasiness on Ghanaians going into 2016, and we must not relent in our strenuous attempts to forestall any contingency that might confront us. The electoral register must be overhauled since its current state is a recipe for avoidable disaster. Thank you.
Signed:
1. ROBERT SARKODIE KLINSMANN +447534455242/+447950318943
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