On Thursday, August 17, 2023, the Chairman of the EC, Jean Adukwei Mensah, criticised Parliament for opposing it’s new Constitutional Instrument seeking to make the Ghana Card the primary and sole form of acceptable identification to get on Ghana’s electoral roll.
In her statement delivered to address the media at Accra, she insisted, that the Ghana Card is the surest way to ensure the integrity of Ghana’s electoral roll.
She also added, that the guarantor system had outlived it’s usefulness. According to her, the Commission does not believe the guarantor system has worked.
“With regard to the CI that is before parliament, we do not intend to put back the guarantor system, because we do not believe that the guarantor system has worked for us.
“Thirty years ago, when we took this journey, and we did not have a Ghana Card, it was only proper that we adopt a system that would ensure that people who didn’t have any documentation could register. And thirty years on, we now have the Ghana Card. And we must rely on it. And it is the surest way to ensure the integrity of our register,” she added.
But the issue at stake is upholding the right of a citizen to vote. The Constitution is consistent and provides for the state to protect the rights of citizens by not disenfranchising a citizen with the right to vote.
The CEO of NIA, Prof Kenneth Agyemang Attafuah, has confirmed, that it’s inability to print and distribute a backlog of captured applications for the Ghana Card, is mainly as a consequence of technical and not financial challenges.
Currently, the Kasena Nankana Municipal Assembly NIA District Office, for example, is unable to accept new applications until a backlog of applications are processed and those applicants issued with a card to clear way for newer applicants to be captured.
This confirms, that a sizeable figure of applicants don’t have a Ghana Card, considering the total sum of those waiting to be issued the card and those in queue to be registered. Yet, the EC is arrogantly and intently insistent to use the Ghana Card as the only recognizable form of identification for applications to register on it’s electoral roll.
In a related case, the Commission has announced the dates for a limited voters registration, starting from Tuesday, September 12, 2023; and ending on October 2, 2023, in preparation for the District Level Elections, which is slated for December this year.
The limited voters registration exercise, however, has been limited to the 238 district offices of the Commission. The criteria by which the EC arrived at this decision has not been fully divulged. However, a particular reason informed the decision to create the polling station, the basic demarcation unit of the Electoral Commission, in the wisdom of the formative years that established the EC.
Besides ensuring decongestion at the polling station and making sure every registered voter is able to cast her or his vote on time on an election day, the decision to zone a polling station within walking distance, was to encourage or incentivize voters to discharge their civic responsibility without incurring additional cost in commuting from destinations, likely to lead to disenfranchising an electorate.
Thus, the decision by the EC to limit the current registration exercise to the EC district office, which in instances of spatially distant and sparsely distributed populated districts largely in rural areas with poor transport system, it is a journey which will require a day or two to reach the said EC district office, is not an incentive enough to encourage interested applicants to embark on such civic responsibility.
Ghanaians chose constitutional rule over military dictatorship. And Ghanaians have never shirked on their primary responsibility to fund the EC, no matter the budget it presents to Parliament for its consideration. Of course, where discretion is poorly exercised, Parliament hasn’t hesitate to say so and provided reasons behind such decision (s). In Ghana, the Fourth Republic has no alternative.
Since her assumption to office as the Chairman of the EC, Jean Adukwei Mensah has engaged in several reforms that refuse to recognise economic and literacy challenges of the electorate, and making such factors an embedded wisdom of the EC to meet this unfortunate electorate, even if it is to avoid instances that could lead to disenfranchise just one person unable to either acquire a Ghana Card and/or subsequently, a voter’s identity card.
Beginning with the EC petition to the Supreme Court of Ghana to delist a birth certificate as a breeder document, which as it stands today according to the unpopular ruling by the SC, is not proof of nationality, it has become a nightmare for a substantial number of eligible voters to meet the inhibitive elitist and selective recommendations of Jean Adukwei Mensah’s EC.
It [the Jean Adukwei Mensah’s EC] has ignored concerns of wasted productive hours and the inconvenience that comes with its involuntary submission, where eligible voters spend weeks, and in some instances months in queues just to acquire a Ghana Card, and repeat the cycle to, in turn, subsequently acquire a Voter’s ID Card, which incidentally are fundamental documents to access other services, including business registration, opening a bank account, etc.
Now, consider the temporary displacement of an eligible voter in a spatially distant sparsely distributed populated district, who due to poor and winding road networks may require circumvention at a lengthy duration of time to reach an EC and NIA district office separately and on different dates, which services are impossible to achieve simultaneously according to their technical feed sequence of primacy.
Also consider the challenges of observing personal hygiene for such temporary displacement, and challenges of accommodation, especially in mosquitoe-infested communities in Ghana today, which has squandered a history of biannual fumigation and spraying exercises for obvious reasons.
And also consider the case of a breadwinner and head of a family, who has been left with no other option but to temporarily abdicate his titular kinship and renege on his parental responsibility in pursuit of two very important documents, because of the elitist sophisticated consumption taste buds of Jean Adukwei Mensah’s EC.
And the list of results from poorly thought-through policy decisions which disregard good governance and rule of law to inflict human rights abuse, are numerous to enumerate.
Conclusively, if in her considered view the guarantor system has not worked, it is regrettable to caution rather harshly, that the resort to use Ghana Card, fraught with reported cases of fraudulent and incredible duplication acquisition, will also not work.
If she isn’t aware, a certain difficult character, Rev Victor Kusi Boateng also acquired a second Ghana Card under the name Kwabena Adu Gyamfi. For the integrity of the electoral roll, she [Jean Adukwei Mensah] must lead the charge to prosecute this character with duality, which an Accra High Court stated has elements of criminality.
©️ Shmuel Ja’Mba Abm