‘IPAC meetings have become waste of time’ – Asiedu Nketia pooh-poohs new EC plan

General Secretary of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), Johnson Asiedu Nketia has cast doubt on the feasibility of the Electoral Commission (EC) plan for a fresh voter’s register.

The EC had a meeting with the Inter-Party Advisory Committee (IPAC) which was boycotted by the NDC and the People’s National Congress (PNC) on Wednesday.

At that meeting, the EC announced a roadmap for the compilation of a new voter roll which will begin in the last week of June.

Reacting to the news, Mr Nketia said the new schedule “is as confusing” as anyone could imagine.

Speaking in an interview with Citi FM on Wednesday, he explained that the EC had released a timetable earlier before the COVID-19 outbreak.

In that timetable, the EC said registration would start on April 18, with the final register being completed by November 8, he recalled.

He said 56 days have been lost due to the outbreak calculating from April 18 to the new commencement date by the EC in June.

He noted that more time would be spent on the electorate during the registration because of COVID-19 and protocols to prevent the spread of the infection.

“Yet you (EC) generate a timetable which you think will be able to get a final register before the election. I mean it is just simply crazy,” he concluded.

To buttress his point, he further stated that there are timelines for the processes ahead of the polls including the period in which copies of the final register are made available to political parties to scrutinise and verify.

Comparing the new outlines, he said those timelines “don’t seem to agree with anything that has been announced today” by the EC.

Additionally, he said application for special voting is done 42 days before elections which would have been at the beginning of November “and if by that time you haven’t finished your voters register then how are you going to process the applications for special voting?”

In his opinion, filing of nomination should take place in September “and you need a final voter register to file nomination…So according to the timetable you (EC) are talking about, the register will not be ready by September”.

He was of the view that the EC is “boxing us into a very dangerous and confusing situation and they are still proud about it”.

Furthermore, Mr Nketia, also known as General Mosquito, claimed that the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS) had produced records showing that eligible people for registration for the voter roll are in excess of 17 million “so even if they (EC) register 16.5million” that will be short and people would be disenfranchised.

For him “IPAC has not endorsed” the new plans and it was the EC that had unilaterally decided.

He said the NDC will, therefore, contest the EC’s position.

He explained that IPAC is a platform for consensus-building that is why some civil society organisations are members to ensure that concerns of all stakeholders are captured in electoral decisions.

In his opinion, the EC is making decisions and imposing the outcomes on IPAC which was unlawful.

“If IPAC has been tamed into a forum where information is just released to us then IPAC has lost its meaning and it will be a waste of time for everybody to go and participate” hence the NDC’s boycott of Wednesday’s meeting.