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The National Democratic Congress (NDC) has called for a review of the national identification registration exercise in the Volta Region due to recurrent challenges.

The National Director of Elections of the NDC, Mr Elvis Afriyie Ankrah, who made the call at a press conference explained that this was necessary so that people would not be “de-nationalised.“

After touring some registration centres in the Volta Region, Mr Afriyie Ankrah expressed concern over the “poorly organised” Ghana Card registration exercise currently going on in the region.”

Mr Afriyie Ankrah indicated that if the right things were not done to address the challenges confronting the exercise in the region, there would be a lack of confidence in the exercise which would make the NDC to resist any attempt to use the card as a requirement by the Electoral Commission (EC) for the 2020 polls.

That, he explained, was because the myriad of problems affecting the exercise might lead to a situation where a lot of Ghanaians might not obtain the card through no fault of theirs.

Long queues

He lamented that looking at the slow pace of registration, a number of people who had the desire to obtain the cards and therefore had queued for many days would not be registered.

That, he said, would therefore not be in the interest of anybody for the card to be used as a requirement for the elections.

The leadership of the party have described the situation as a weapon of the government to make people in the region they consider the stronghold of the NDC to lose interest in obtaining the card.

Mr Afriyie Ankrah observed that the average number of people who registered a day was at most 60 due to the slow process which left many in queues at various centres on a daily basis, with some of the people having had to queue for more than six days without getting the opportunity to register.

Review of process

‘’In fact, some registration centres in constituencies like South Tongu are able to register at most 30 people per day’, he indicated.

He said the NIA, following the experience in the Greater Accra Region, should have been proactive to ensure that they put mechanisms in place to ensure speedy resolution of such incidents whenever they occurred.

The three weeks registration exercise is scheduled to end on August 14 but Mr Afriyie Ankrah called on the NIA to appease the people for the frustrations they had encountered before obtaining the card by extending the deadline by an additional three weeks.

He also appealed to the NIA to put in place measures to increase the number of people registered per day from 60 to 200 in order to make room for the backlog, and for every eligible person to register.