Good morning to all of you. This is the day our Father God has made. We rejoice and we are glad in it. On behalf of the Electoral Commission, I warmly welcome all of you to our headquarters this morning. I’m glad to see everyone around the table looking hale and hearty after a fiercely competitive election.
We thank God for the gift of life and for making it possible for us to gather and to come together again to discuss issues relating to our dear country, particularly relating to elections and multi-party democracy. You are all welcome.
Before I proceed, I would like on behalf of the Electoral Commission to present heartfelt congratulations to the National Democratic Congress. You won the elections of 2024 without a shadow of doubt. As they say, ‘nothing missing nothing broken’.
And it was clear that you were the winners of the elections. Congratulations. To their competitors, the New Petrophic Party, and to all other political parties and independent candidates, we say, better luck next time.
To our media partners who have walked this journey with us, and to our CSOs who have continued to participate in the meetings of IPAC and have continued to share with us useful and valuable inputs, we say thank you very much. We thank you for believing in us and for walking this journey with us.
Today’s meeting is really just to reconvene, and the purpose of our meeting here this morning is to reconvene and to rekindle the cooperation and the collaboration between the Electoral Commission and the political parties as well as civil society.
So we are not gathered here to have a thorough in-depth discussion on the 2024 elections. I believe we will provide enough notice for that. But we thought it was important to keep the fold together.
And since the elections of 2024, we have not had the opportunity to meet. So we thought it was important to re-gather, to reconvene, and to rekindle the spirit of cooperation as we chart the way forward for the future elections in this country. I’m sure you all agree with me that the outcome of the 2024 general elections is a confirmation and an affirmation that our processes and our systems work.
The outcomes are indeed an attestation that elections in Ghana are free, fair, credible, and transparent. It is a confirmation that elections are indeed won or lost at the polling station, and therefore it is important for political parties to also own what happens at the polling stations. It is also a confirmation that the Electoral Commission of Ghana can be trusted to conduct and undertake free, fair, transparent, and credible elections year after year.
It is also an affirmation that the choice of the people and the citizens as expressed at the polls is what the Electoral Commission of Ghana will always support and declare. As a Commission, we have always maintained that our role is not to make any candidate or political party a winner. This is a message that we have reiterated time and time again, and it was not lost on us any time we had our meetings with our staff, both permanent and temporary, as well as our meetings with key stakeholders.
We highlighted the role of the Commission, which was to conduct free, fair, credible, and transparent elections. And I am glad that our role has been upheld. I am happy to note that by God’s grace we have lived up to our role and our mandate as enshrined in the Constitution.
Indeed, observers, both local and international, have indicated that the elections of 2024 have been the best in the history of the Fourth Republic. As I noted earlier, our purpose here is not to undertake an immediate examination or review of the elections. We are well aware that the political parties are undertaking their own reviews, and so are we.
As we speak, we started a bottom-up approach, where we started from our Field Officers, our District Officers, all the way to the regional level. And we intend to also meet with our Regional leaders and heads in the coming days to undertake a thorough and in-depth examination and assessment of the 2024 elections. We are also mindful that a lot of you are doing the same.
And so at the right time, in the coming weeks, the Commission will hold a meeting with a view to having a discussion on the elections, from the A to Z, from registration to declaration, to look at the lessons learned, what went well, what didn’t go so well, and what we can do to improve upon elections and to chart the way forward. So we just wanted to see your faces. The last time we saw your faces, everybody had anxiety on their faces.
We thought, let’s reconvene, let’s see your faces, let’s have a light discussion, let’s build and strengthen the collaboration and the cooperation that exist between us, and prepare for the next IPAC meeting where we will have a thorough review of the elections to ensure that we are charting the way forward for the future. On behalf of the Electoral Commission, I’d like to wish all of you a happy and prosperous new year. We haven’t had the chance to wish each other a happy and prosperous new year.
We look forward to a constructive discussion at our IPAC meetings. We look forward to your valuable inputs, which we believe will help strengthen our elections going forward. And once again, we would like to congratulate the winners of the 2024 General Elections.
So we would like to congratulate you and to all the others, NPP and all the other political parties. We wish you better luck next time.
May God bless all of you, bless your hearts, bless the Electoral Commission of Ghana, bless our homeland Ghana and make her great and strong.
Thank you very much.
Source: myjoyonline.com