The President of IMANI Africa, Franklin Cudjoe, has defended his comments that the Electoral Commission (EC) disenfranchised the people of Santrokofi, Apkafu, Lolobi and Lipke (SALL) from voting in the 2020 parliamentary elections.
This follows a statement by the EC, which described Mr Cudjoe’s assertion as false and misinformation and urged the public to disregard it.
The EC said it followed all the legal processes in creating a constituency and never disenfranchised the people in the newly created Guan Constituency.
In a reply to the EC, Mr Cudjoe said the exclusion of voters in the SALL traditional areas from voting in the election for a member of Parliament was a flagrant violation of the right to vote of the said voters.
He said this has left the people of the area without representation in Ghana’s Parliament.
“It is brazenly dishonest on the part of the Electoral Commission to refer to my statement about the people of SALL being disenfranchised as ‘falsehood and misinformation’ or ‘falsehood and untruths about the Commission”’.
READ ALSO: We Never Disenfranchised SALL Residents; IMANI Peddling Falsehood – EC
“None of the so-called ‘facts surrounding the inability of the residents of SALL, now the Guan Constituency, to vote in the 2020 Parliamentary Election’ that are recited in the 14th May 2024 statement of the Electoral Commission can take away the simple, indisputable fact that, on the eve of the 2020 elections, the Electoral Commission publicly announced that the people of SALL could not vote in the parliamentary election. The people of SALL were, therefore, disenfranchised and are not represented in the 8th Parliament of the 4th Republic,” he said in a statement.
The IMANI president cited some instances, including a meeting he facilitated between the EC Chairperson, Mrs Jean Mensa and elders of SALL on November 30th 2020, to prove the commission’s deliberate attempt to disenfranchise the people of the area.
He added that the commission’s statement is not only “brazenly dishonest but puts on stark display to the whole world the gross incompetence of the Jean Mensa-led Electoral Commission”.
Meanwhile, in November 2023, Attorney General Godfred Yeboah Dame declared that the Electoral Commission had made significant progress toward guaranteeing representation for the SALL traditional areas in Parliament with his active support.
Answering questions in Parliament, Mr. Dame said that in 2021, the Electoral Commission (EC), with the guidance of his office, started the process of creating a new constituency for the Guan District.
He was very optimistic that the people of SALL would have a representation in Parliament in the next elections.“The Commission held a consultative meeting with stakeholders in the new Guan District for a proposed name and headquarters of the new Constituency. The stakeholders unanimously agreed on a constituency name, Guan Constituency, with the headquarters being Likpe-Mate,” he noted.
Below is the full statement by Franklin Cudjoe