Officials of both the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) and opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) are fuming over what they call lack of transparency.
Even though the commission had tasked a three-man committee to find out what went wrong, the two parties say that step was not enough to restore the confidence of contestants in the December general elections.
At a press conference in Accra yesterday, the NPP general secretary, Nana Ohene Ntow, disclosed that at the last Inter-Party Advisory Committee (IPAC) meeting with the EC a week ago, it was agreed that a committee of all political party representatives, Information Technology (IT) experts and the commission should come together to investigate the matter, with a view to clearing any doubts hanging over the voters’ register.
“We do not object to the EC carrying out its own internal investigations. However, with the lingering on of the impasse, without any transparent approach towards getting to the bottom of the matter, the suspicions and mistrust brewing over the register can only get worse. We are therefore calling on the EC to institute an open and transparent stakeholder investigation into the issue as a matter of urgency”, he noted.
Echoing the call from the President, John Agyekum Kufuor, that the EC and all stakeholders should ensure that this year’s election is a peaceful one, Nana Ntow stated that the setting up of a three-man internal committee to look into such serious allegations is not enough.
He told the media that when the NPP heard the allegation of a bloated register, it compared the register in its possession with what the EC produced to refute the NDC, and noted that there were slight differences, of about twenty, between the two.
The general secretary stressed that even though the difference was not enough to create any major confusion, there is the need to resolve the issue.
In a related development, the NDC deputy general secretary, Elvis Afriyie-Ankrah, has slammed the EC for the same reasons given by the ruling party.
Speaking to the paper via telephone from Bimbila in the Northern Region where he was on a campaign trip with the party’s flag-bearer, Prof. John Evans Atta Mills, he insisted that the formation of the committee by the EC was against the true spirit of IPAC.
“We all agreed at IPAC that a committee be formed; we agreed that we include the political parties and possibly some IT experts. Now they say they have a three-man committee, and they haven’t even informed us formally.
“All these things would have been resolved at the beginning if they had agreed that the information they gave us had a problem,” he said.
For the way forward, Afriyie-Ankrah suggested his party could reconsider its stance if only the commission would eat humble pie and apologize for that mistake.
“Master, we are not litigants. We are not in competition with the EC. If they admit their mistake, this matter will drop the following morning, and then we move forward. As long as they want to maintain that we manufactured the figures, this matter will take a new dimension,” he stressed.
He went on: “If the committee is set up and it is found out that they actually gave us the information, which we know they did, what will happen then is that the people will call their competence into dispute. So as an individual I am just giving them free advise and consultancy. They should apologize,” he said.
So far, only the Convention People’s Party (CPP) has refrained from lambasting the EC over the issue.
It urged the stakeholders to tread the path of reason and dialogue in the interest of political stability and national development.
The publicity secretary, Kosi Dedey, cautioned that “It is our common interest to exercise restraint and help strengthen the integrity of the EC”.
The NDC recently alleged that some information it received from the EC late last year suggested that the Ashanti regional register had been bloated.
Even though the EC denied the allegation, it promised to look into the matter.
The commission’s acting head of Public Affairs and Human Resources, Samuel Yorke Aidoo, has explained that the three-man committee, comprising Kwadwo Safo Kantanka (deputy chairman, finance and administration), David Kanga and Ebenezer Addison, was an internal one. |
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