The controversy surrounding the voters register appears to be tearing the nation apart, with the two dominant political parties, the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the New Patriotic Party (NPP), maintaining their entrenched positions on it.
The latest on the matter occurred yesterday when the NDC pulled out of a debate organised by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA).
The IEA debate formed part of moves to bring together the differing views on the matter in order to engender common grounds for the collection and collation of views that will be communicated to the Electoral Commission (EC) to inform its decision.
NDC’s withdrawal
But the NDC, which had agreed to participate in the debate, pulled out at the last moment, saying the IEA had usurped the powers of the EC.
The crack in opinion, further deepened with a call by some members of the public, complemented by the NPP, for the involvement of Interpol to investigate allegations that names of Togolese had been found in Ghana’s voters register.
However, a Deputy General Secretary of the NDC, Mr Koku Anyidoho, said if there should be any involvement of Interpol, it would rather find the NPP culpable of criminal indulgence.
He said the decision of the NDC to withdraw from the debate was based on an afterthought that it would be more prudent to wait and make the case for an audit of the register when all stakeholders met with the EC at the end of the month.
Mr Anyidoho, in an interview, later accused the NPP of scheming to deny people of the Volta and the Northern regions living in the Ashanti Region from registering and that the matter had been reported to National Security.
On the withdrawal by the NDC and the accusation that the IEA had usurped the powers of the EC, the Executive Director of the IEA, Mrs Jean Mensa, said the debate by the institute could no way be termed a usurpation of the EC’s power but part of efforts to engender national cohesion on a matter that threatened to divide the country.
But the General Secretary of the Christian Council of Ghana (CCG), Rev. Dr Kwabena Opuni-Frimpong speaking to the issue later, said allegations made by the NPP regarding the names of foreigners on the voters register ought to be investigated while steps were taken to address the substantive matter of whether or not to compile a new register.
The Director of Communications of the NPP, Nana Akomeah, debunked claims by the NDC that the NPP intended to prevent some ethnic groups from voting. The debate itself was sharply divided along two main lines.
While one school of thought stuck to the position that a new register should be compiled, another school was of the view that the existing register could be pruned and audited. A former Deputy Speaker of Parliament and leading member of the NPP, Professor Mike Oquaye, articulated his party’s position, while a Senior Lecturer at the Political Science Department of the University of Ghana, Dr Ransford Gyampo, argued out the stance of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) because the NDC had decided to pull out of the debate.
Review of electoral laws
Prof. Oquaye stressed the need for a review of the country’s electoral laws to make way for a well-structured legal framework that included electoral offences and their punitive regime.
He said under the current dispensation, the country lacked clear-cut laws on electoral offences, a situation which made it unattractive to institute criminal processes against electoral offenders.
Such laws, he said, ought to, for instance, state sanctions for underage voter registration, ballot box snatchers and foreigners who attempted to register as voters in Ghana.
He said restructuring of the legal framework should be a prelude to the creation of a new register for the 2016 elections.
A contrary view
But Dr Gyampo held a contrary view, challenging the validity, truthfulness and reliability of the NPP’s position. He said past experiences had shown that political parties would go to any length to win power and wondered why the NPP had made allegations in only NDC strongholds.
He posited that the voters register was not the only component in the call for electoral reforms and wondered why the NPP had chosen to make the creation of a new register its prime preoccupation.
He said the situations that led to the problems with the register were created by the political parties who tended to encourage underage persons to register as voters and also brought in foreigners to register.
For him, until the underlying causes of those problems were addressed, they would keep recurring and always occasion a fresh register for every general election.
Prof. Oquaye argued that the Supreme Court, in giving its ruling on the election petition, had called for electoral reforms, adding, “But a year to another election, nothing has been done. We are not serious.”
Register compromised
He said the election petition had shown that all was not well with the voters register and that it was incurably flawed. He said the register had been compromised and that no purging or correction could be done, the only option being abolishing it and creating a new one.
Prof. Oquaye was also of the view that there were millions of people who had registered using National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) cards which had been outlawed by the Supreme Court, saying that called for the register to be scrapped.
But Dr Gyampo countered that the Supreme Court decision had not said that because people had registered using the NHIS card, the voters register ought to be invalidated.
He was of the view that steps ought to be taken to purge parts of the register that had challenges, saying a perfect register was utopian but a reasonably credible register was attainable through pruning, finding and deleting what ought not to be in the register.
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