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A former Chief Executive Officer of the Volta River Authority (VRA), Dr Charles Wereko-Brobby, has described the recent Supreme Court decision on the voters register as lacking clarity and precision.

He said the judgement, as it stood now, appeared ambiguous, which had given room to laypersons and lawyers to give it slanted meanings or various spins, depending on their interest in the matter.

“I think it is ambiguous. Laypersons will read it one way, while lawyers will have a field day to argue about what it means,” he said in an interview with the Daily Graphic in Accra yesterday.

“What I am saying is if you take the ordinary meaning, implementation will face many challenges,” Dr Wereko-Brobby, who is also the Chief Policy Adviser at the Ghana Institute for Public Policy Options (GIPPO), noted.

Supreme Court decision

The Supreme Court, on Thursday, May 5, 2016, ordered the Electoral Commission (EC) to delete/clean names of persons not eligible from the voters register.

It also directed that the affected persons should be given the opportunity to re-register.

Three categories of names to be deleted are deceased persons, minors and persons who registered with NHIS cards.

However, there are divided opinions on whether or not those who used NHIS cards to register were part of the affected persons.

One school of thought is of the view that the Supreme Court had extensively touched on the unconstitutionality of using NHIS cards to register and further gone ahead to state those persons could not be taken off the electoral roll without being provided means of re-registering. It was therefore untenable for others to claim NHIS card holders’ names were not to be deleted.

Others, however, indicate that names of NHIS card holders are not among those to be deleted because the Supreme Court did not make that specific pronouncement in its order.

Clean and delete

Joining the discussion, Dr Wereko-Brobby said if the judgement truly meant NHIS card holders should be deleted, what it meant was that almost 14 million cards would have to be sorted out at a rate of 100,000 cards per day for a period of five months.

That, he noted with concern, would throw the electoral calendar into a state of disarray, thereby making it impossible for elections to be held on November 7, 2016, as proposed by the EC.

Reverting to the old calendar of December 7, he stated, might also turn out to be impossible should the names of persons who registered with NHIS cards be deleted.

That, he said, would certainly create a constitutional crisis.

“Delete is one form of cleaning but it is not exclusive that cleaning means delete. There are many ways to clean other than deleting.

“We need further and better particulars from the Supreme Court,” he stated.

Worrying trend

Dr Wereko-Brobby described as “worrying” the various spins that had been placed on the judgement, saying that was not good for Ghana’s democracy.

He, accordingly, called on the parties in the case to file the necessary papers and seek further and better particulars from the Supreme Court.

“We are some few months away from the general election and it is important that such issues are put to rest once and for all,” he added.

Different interpretations

There are divided opinions on the Supreme Court judgement and its accompanying orders.

The judgement, when read holistically, implies that persons who registered with NHIS cards in 2012 are not eligible to vote until they use acceptable means to re-register.

Another group also holds the view that the court did not cite NHIS card holders as being among those to be deleted.

The court had, in 2014, declared that the use of NHIS cards as a means of identification for registration was unconstitutional because those cards could be possessed by foreigners and, thereby, were not enough to prove citizenship.

The EC has issued a statement that it is studying the court’s judgement and will make its position known to the public in due course.

Background

A former National Youth Organiser of the People’s National Convention (PNC), Mr Abu Ramadan, and Mr Evans Nimako were the applicants in the case, while the EC and the Attorney-General were the respondents.

The applicants invoked the original jurisdiction of the Supreme Court to declare that upon a true and proper interpretation of Article 45 (a) of the Constitution, the mandate of the EC to compile the register of voters implied a duty to compile a reasonably accurate and credible register.

The court declared that the current register of voters, which contains the names of persons who had not established qualification to be registered, was not reasonably accurate or credible.

It also upheld a prayer that the current register of voters, which contains the names of persons who are deceased, was not reasonably accurate or credible.

It, however, refused to grant an order setting aside the current voters register and compel the EC to compile a fresh register before the conduct of any new public election or referendum in Ghana.

It also refused to order the EC to audit the current voters register through the validation of the registration of each person currently on the register.