Some Electoral Commissioners hate NDC too much to be neutral – Pratt fears for 2020 elections

Managing Editor of the Daily Insight newspaper, Kwesi Pratt Jr., has questioned the neutrality of the Electoral Commission (EC) less than a year to the 2020 polls.

According to the veteran journalist, the credibility of the EC is tainted by disparaging comments made by certain officials against the opposition National Democratic Congress.

His comments come in the wake of a proposal by the EC to adopt a new voter roll.

This, Mr. Pratt, said is a sign of the EC caving into the New Patriotic Party’s long-held agenda for a new register.

The NPP since 2014, while it was in opposition, has been pushing for a new register.

At a forum organised by the Coalition of Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) for Good Governance in Accra on Thursday, to relay reasons to shelf plans of a new voter roll, Mr. Pratt said: “We have an Electoral Commission whose members are publicly and openly showing their hatred for political parties and contestants in the next election. You had a Deputy Commissioner actually make the point that the NDC cannot be trusted and that the NDC wants to subvert the current democratic order and to plunge this country into chaos”.

He continued: “If you actually believe that one of the parties likely to contest the 2020 elections is a virus; that one of the parties has an agenda to destroy Ghana why won’t you do everything and anything possible to prevent that party from winning elections?”.

Dr. Eric Asare Bossman, Deputy Chairman of the EC has said in April 2019, that: “if there is anyone who is becoming a threat or a potential threat to the democracy we are practicing in our country, then I will rather say that it is the posture of the NDC”.

Mr Pratt has proposed that the statement needs to be probed considering recent developments regarding activities of the EC.

“We have a situation where we cannot vouch for the independence of some of the Commissioners,” he lamented.

Earlier in the same presentation, Mr. Pratt asserted that the country will not accept the 2020 polls if it is conducted in a biased manner.

“Whatever we do, the 2020 elections is an important phase in our struggle. If that election is conducted freely and fairly, we must accept whoever is declared the winner but if that election is conducted in the ‘conie-conie’ way we are beginning to see, we’ll not accept the result.

“Comrades and friends, this is not rabble-rousing, this is upholding the Constitution because the Constitution enjoins all of us to make sure that nobody employs any hanky-panky way in assuming power in this country, that’s a constitutional injunction,” he emphasized.