“I can assure you that if we make a commitment to change this voter’s register, years from now, we will be talking about the same thing…changing will not solve the problem…if you have a situation where political activists deliberately recruit people to over vote to register minors and so on…no matter the amount of money you put in the exercise, you end up with a flawed register. So the political parties should stop wasting our ears….” says the Managing Editor of the Insight newspaper, Kwesi Pratt Jnr.
Kwesi Pratt was commenting on the brouhaha surrounding the voter’s register and the call from the opposition to have it changed.
A latest move to demand that the Electoral Commission changes the voter’s register is a call on former Presidents Jerry John Rawlings and John Agyekum Kuffour by the Let My Vote Count Alliance (LMVCA), a pro-opposition pressure group.
Prior to this, the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) had petitioned the EC with what it described as evidence to show that the current register is not just bloated with minors, but with names of over 70,000 Togolese nationals.
Later, LMVCA waded into the campaign with several news conferences and an attempt to picket at the offices of the EC, which ended abruptly following violent clashes with the police.
LMVCA a few days ago, called on former Presidents Jerry John Rawlings and John Agyekum Kufour to add their voice to the debate.
Former President Rawlings urged the EC to work towards a credible register for 2016 while Former President Kufuor called for a new voters register.
Speaking to the issue during a panel discussion on Radio Gold’s Alhaji and Alhaji, Kwesi Pratt said the way forward is not to change the voter’s register or to pay courtesy call on former Presidents but “to have a National ID card system which can be used for national health insurance, Voter’s ID and so on. A new voter’s register is not the answer”.
“…the way to cure it is not by another voter’s register and everybody knows that… Doesn’t former President Kufuor know this? Nana Konadu Agyeman Rawlings doesn’t she know this? Former President Rawlings doesn’t he know this? So why waste our time and beat about the bush? Former President Rawlings took part in two elections in all of those occasions, the same opposition, NPP included, said that the voters registers were incurably flawed; what did he do about it then? Has he forgotten that these same things happened in his tenure?” he quizzed.
According to him, the voter’s register has been changed over the years and the problem still persist; “they are still complaining…and then they believe that if they go from former heads of state to former heads of state and so on, they will create a certain avalanche to whip all of us into position…but it is not their fault…they believe that the voter’s register needs to be changed; they think that if it is changed, it gives them an advantage…In politics there is the need for some consistency…I get worried about all of these hypocrisy and double standards…”
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