It is obvious that a large part of the Ghanaian media is deliberately setting up Dr. Mahamadu Bawumia, vice presidential candidate of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) for attack and humiliation.
The content of his last Tuesday press conference have been twisted to make him sound illogical and sometimes confused. Nowhere in the statement he made to the media, did Dr. Bawumia claim that there are more than 70,000 Togolese on Ghana’s voters register.
What Dr. Bawumia said was that an NPP sponsored team “Set out to compare Ghana’s voters register with those of neighboring countries and the results were astonishingly alarming.”
The Daily Graphic of Wednesday, August 19, 2015 quoted him as saying “…with copies of Togo’s voter’s register and that of Ghana, the team used biometric facial recognition technology and found potential matches of 76,286 persons on Togo’s electoral register look like the same number of people on Ghana’s register.
He does not say that those 76,286 people are also on Ghana’s voters register. All he says is that the two set of people look alike.
Dr. Bawumia does not also say that the 76,286 people are Togolese or Ghanaian.
In any case, even if he said that they were Togolese there could not be any problem with that given the fact that the constitution of Ghana allows Ghanaian-Togolese to vote in national elections. Article 8(1) of the 1992 constitution states that” A citizen of Ghana may hold the citizenship of any other country in addition to his citizenship of Ghana.
The only disqualification of Ghanaians with dual citizenship are spelt out in Article 8(2) which reads as follows,” without prejudice to article 94 (2) of the constitution, no citizen of Ghana shall qualify to be appointed as a holder of any office specified in this clause if he holds the citizenship of any other country in addition to his citizenship of Ghana.
a. Ambassador or High Commissioner b. Chief of Defence Staff or any Service Chief. c. Secretary to the Cabinet d. Inspector General of Police e. Commissioner, Custom, Excise and preventive Service. f. Director of Immigration Service and g. Any office specified by an act of Parliament. Ghana’s electoral process is not offended by people who look like Togolese or persons with dual citizenship registering in two countries.
In any case even if all that Dr., Bawumia alleges are true, why can’t the Electoral Commission use it sown methods to clean up the register?
Why should Ghana go through all the expense of compiling a new voter’s register when we can just simply clean up the old one? Is there any guarantee that a new voter’s register will still not have the credibility problems which Dr. Bawumia alleges? There is something curious about the voters registers exhibited by Dr. Bawumia.
The Ghana register has the names of voters, their identity numbers, ages and more.
Strangely, the Togo register exhibited by Dr. Bawumia has only the identity number of the voters. Did somebody remove the other details and why?
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