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I must first apologise for abandoning my weekly column for three weeks. My fingers are still recovering, after suffering fractures and swelling from the police brutalities I, alongside others, suffered on September 16. Our crime was to dare to demonstrate for a new electoral role in Ghana.

Justice Adzakumah, a protestor in the Let My Vote Count Alliance demonstration, had his eyeball removed when a bullet from the police hit him on that bloody Wednesday. He has now become the symbol of the Police State into which our smooth-talking President Mahama is effectively transforming Ghana. Thus, when Mahama talks about changing lives, he means changing the life of families like the Adzakumahs, who now have to struggle even more to make ends meet.

I will not say much about that ordeal in this piece except to ask the question: what is in the existing electoral register that they are so desperate to not let us see to the extent that they will remove the eye of a protester who ventured? What is so special about the 2012 register that police would pounce on already dispersing protestors with tear gas, water canons, rubber bullets, batons and arrests? 

So far my biggest disappointment in all the happenings is with how Charlotte Osei is handling her new job. She is behaving as if before she was allowed to take up her post she signed an unholy pact with the President to deliver the 2016 election. And that, crucial to honouring that pact is to do all that she can to protect the existing electoral register. And, in return she has asked the President to protect her and her office from any pressure from quarters such as LMVCA.
When on June 30, 2015, the President appointed her as the Chairperson of the Electoral Commission, there were at least five priority matters in Kwadwo Afari-Gyan’s handing over notes. (1) Talensi By-election (2) District Assembly elections (3) 2016 General Elections (4) Electoral Reforms (5) Voters’ Register.

Talensi went on smoothly, as far as the work of the EC was concerned. The problems encountered there had to do with the authorities allowing ‘violence to beget violence’, with clashes between the respective security gangs of the two main parties, NDC and NPP.

The District Assembly elections, a very expensive exercise, took place last month with the usual low voter interest. The new EC boss would not have been happy with reports that some voters could not find their details on the EC database, adding to mounting pressure to have a complete, independent overhaul of the EC database to restore its integrity.
The 2016 general elections are expected to take place either in November or latest by December 7. The job of the Charlotte Osei-led Commission is to prepare towards it. Key to that is preparing and presenting a comprehensive budget on time, for the attention of Ghana’s donor partners, on one hand, and the Ministry of Finance and Parliament, where the 2017 national budget will be read and approved next month, on the other hand. That budget must include the cost of implementing decisions taken on how the next polls should be conducted. These include the funding of electoral reforms and the fate of the register for 2016. On electoral reforms, by the time the new EC boss took office, stakeholders had agreed on most of the major reforms needed. So, essentially her job may be simply to fine-tune and, essentially, implement.

That leaves us with the final and what has turned out to be the most controversial of them all: to do or not to do a new voters’ register. I have come to the conclusion that Charlotte Osei and her Commission have no intention to compile a new voters’ register. This conclusion is drawn from the conduct of the Commission before and during Charlotte, and her own conduct since.

Let me sum it all up: the pace at which she is addressing the new register question does not speak of one who is considering the possibility of compiling a new register. It is the pace of a Commission that is merely playing for time. Let me explain.

Before Charlotte, the EC defended the 2012 register. In August 2014 during the limited registration, the EC rebuffed doubts over the register and defended it as “credible and genuine”. What about it being bloated, the EC assured, the “register has no anomalies and that all such names have been identified and removed.” 

Really? A year earlier, under cross-examination, Dr Afari-Gyan told the Supreme Court on Friday, June 7, 2013, that the EC eliminated a little over 8,000 instances of double registration from the 2012 voters’ register. In 2014, before the limited registration, EC informed the political parties that it had found 68,000 cases of double registration. After the exercise, the numbers went up to 72,000. After all the series of de-duplication by the EC, NPP still managed to pull out over 2,000 cases of double registration just last month! This was after analysing a small portion of the ‘cleaned up’, updated register the EC gave PDF copies to the parties recently.

The EC’s own evidence shows that there are serious problems with the integrity of their database. Yet, they come across as more concerned about protecting their image and the contracts connected to the Biometric Voter Register than protecting the integrity of the database itself.

On July 23, 2015, Christian Owusu Parry, the Electoral Commission’s Director of Public Affairs, in responding to a call from the Let My Vote Count Alliance for a new voters’ register, stated what was clearly the EC’s position. He told Joy News, “The Commission’s position remains the same. It has not changed. The register is very, very credible, and fit to be used for any election in this country,” In other words, the Charlotte Osei-led EC had no intention whatsoever to change Ghana’s electoral roll.

This was four weeks after Mrs Charlotte Osei had taken over as the new Chairperson of the EC. By Friday, July 24, the EC had toned down from its hardline view and was now saying they welcome proposals for a new register. Is this the new position of the EC or a new ‘diplomatic’ PR style of pretending to be listening?

Forget the PR. The actual conduct of the EC has been tellingly discouraging. The NPP presented its proposal for a new register in January 2015 and not even a response from the EC. It had written to the EC to present the party with a CSV format of the electoral roll, one that can be easily analysed on a spreadsheet, rather than the usual PDF format, which is tedious to do anything with. That was also ignored.

On August 18, 2015, the NPP presented evidence of over 76,000 Togolese nationals, with no local addresses provided, on Ghana’s register. The NPP also presented evidence of scanned photographs found on the register even though photographs were digitally taken and transferred onto the EC database.
On August 21, Charlotte Osei invited political parties to present proposals on the voters’ register by September 22. It sounded democratic; let us also here from the other political parties even if they have no view on this voters’ register saga. The more the merrier.

On the EC website, there are 24 officially recognized political parties in Ghana. They include the following: Tetteh K Ibrahim’s United Development System Party, with the slogan “Unity the Best”, Kobina Amoo-Aidoo’s Ghana National Party, with the slogan ‘Redeem Ghana, Now! Now! Now!”, Annin-Kofi Addo’s Yes People’s Party, with the slogan “Tenafa, Keep Profits in Ghana”, and Ward Brew’s Democratic People’s Party, with the slogan “God is Great”.

The others include, Akua Donkor’s Ghana Freedom Party, Kofi Wayo’s United Renaissance Party, Prophet Daniel Nkansah’s New Vision Party, Independent People’s Party, United Love Party, United Front Party, Ghana Democratic Republican Party, Democratic Freedom Party, Reformed Patriotic Democrats, United Front Party, Great Consolidated Popular Party, EGLE Party, and United Ghana Movement, a party that famously announced in 2001 that it was going on indefinite leave.

There are of course others, like the NPP, NDC, CPP, PNC, PPP, NDP, and UPP. The parties dutifully presented their proposals to the EC only to be told that they should come back in another month to make oral submissions (30 minutes each) on the documents they have presented to the EC.

It is billed as a transparent, public event to demonstrate the EC’s commitment to an open and democratic way of addressing the register issue. But, should we be taken in by this burlesque exhibition of apparent bad faith?
To me, this is all a parody of time-wasting. Nine months since the NPP presented its evidence on the voters’ register. No response. Three months since the party presented a ‘bombshell’ of further evidence and the best Ghanaians could get from Charlotte Osei was to announce last month that she was about to commission an IT expert to look into aspects of the NPP evidence.

So what next after the October circus, where Akua Donkor and others will have the opportunity to present their case? Reducing this whole matter to one of majoritarian advocacy around the IPAC table offers but a farcical escape route for the EC. Majority of the 24 political parties entitled to a vote at IPAC exist only in name. Per the last presidential election results, NDC and NPP controlled 98.44% of the total valid votes cast. But that is not even the issue.

Before the EC ‘forced’ the other political parties to submit a view on the register, the responsible thing should have been to put the evidence before it to some independent, scientific evaluation to better inform the discourse. As it is now, it may not even be known before the end of October if those 76,000 Togolese names were entitled to be on our register. It may also not be known the veracity of allegations of scanned photographs. So what is going to inform the views of those without the capacity to undertake the kind of investigative analysis the NPP has done but who have the sense of mind to evaluate an independent report on the matters on the table?

If the EC was open, sincere, serious and objective about what to do with the current register, it would have worked with a timetable guided by two important considerations: budget and time. As it is now, only Charlotte Osei and her team are aware of the timetable to which she is addressing this matter. The rest of the country only gets to know of her next move after every monthly IPAC meeting. Is this her way of playing a joke on all of us?

The lack of sense of urgency in Charlotte Osei’s approach to these critical issues only lead to two possible scenarios: either she has not the slightest clue about the urgency of the work confronting her or that her mind is long made up and she has no intention to change the current register. I opt for the latter.

By this time in 2011, the EC had already picked which company was to undertake the BVR exercise. Even with funding available, it can take up to 3 months to send out tender documents, evaluate responses and select a winner. It can take another 2-3 months for the selected vendor to prepare for the registration exercise.

I have come to the conclusion that the EC is in agreement with the President and the NDC. Which is that, after all the parody, the EC will ignore all the evidence for a new register and opt for a botched job of ‘cleaning up’ the current one.
President John Mahama told a French audience last Wednesday that he had no right to interfere in the work of the EC. Except, he exercised his freedom to remind the new EC boss of what was done in the past after a register was used just once. He said the practice has been to simply “clean it up”. He explained, "… [I]t's a relatively young register because we used it for only one election and it is a register that was biometrically compiled."

The EC boss must be reminded that countries like Tanzania, Guinea, Burkina Faso and Cote d’Ivoire were willing to change their ‘young’ registers because they saw it as necessary. Saying we should stick to the current register regardless of how incurably flawed it might be is like saying, irrespective of how bad he has ruled, President John Mahama must be given a second term because all others before him had a second term.

I would love the EC to challenge these damming claims I have made and come up with a timetable that is realistic whether we have a new register or not. Secondly, to tell us what her funding plans are for a new register. If she is not able to provide these answers before the October public forum then she must agree with me that it is all a pantomime that speaks in gestures and conduct that she has absolutely no intention to compile a new, credible biometric voters’ register.