Afari-Gyan Admits To Double Registrations In 2012 Voters Register

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Category: Elections & Governance

Created on Thursday, 06 June 2013 00:00

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Afari-Gyan Admits To Double Registrations In 2012 Voters Register

{sidebar id=12 align=right}Chairman of the Electoral Commission, Dr. Kwadwo Afrai-Gyan, has admitted to several instances of double registration in the register of voters used for the 2012 general elections.

His admission follows a submission of a list of 51 such instances by Mr. Philip Addison, counsel for the election petitioners challenging the outcome of the presidential election which returned President John Mahama as the winner.

Mr. Addison is continuing his cross-examination of the EC Chairman at the Supreme Court.

Dr. Afari-Gyan, the sole returning officer for the presidential poll, had previously told the court that the use of the biometric registration and verification system had helped to improve the conduct of elections, specifically in helping to prevent double registration and impersonation.

He had also said that the 2012 election was the most transparent of all six elections he had superintended in the country. Ghana has had general elections (Presidential and Parliamentary) since returning to constitutional rule in 1992.

The NPP presidential candidate for the 2012 elections, Nana Akufo-Addo, his running mate Dr Mahamudu Bawumia and NPP chairman, Jake Obetsebi-Lamptey have petitioned the Supreme Court to annul over 4.5 million votes for alleged irregularities and malpractices and consequently overturn the declared result in favour of Nana Addo.

Source: Graphic.com.gh

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NDC Endorses Petitioners Case...Opens Way For A Re-run?

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Category: Elections & Governance

Created on Tuesday, 07 May 2013 00:00

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NDC Endorses Petitioners Case...Opens Way For A Re-run?

{sidebar id=12 align=right}Counsel for the National Democratic Congress, in the ongoing Supreme Court petition challenging the declared outcome of the December 7th Presidential election, on Tuesday endorsed the case of the petitioners that the December Presidential elections were fraught with irregularities.

Tsatsu Tsikata did so by introducing new pink sheets outside the 11,138 pink sheets being challenged by the petitioners to prove that indeed there were irregularities in the elections, with his intention being to suggest that those irregularities also happened in the strongholds of the NPP.

This interesting turn of events, which occurred as Counsel for the 3rd Respondents continued his cross examination of the main witness of the petitioners, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, seems to have strengthened the case of the petitioners who have long held that the elections of December 7th were marred with widespread irregularities which affected the outcome of the elections and largely inured to the benefit of John Mahama.

It would be observed that since the commencement of the case all the respondents, the Electoral Commission, John Mahama and the NDC have maintained that the elections were not affected by irregularities whatsoever with John Mahama even stating during his State of the Nation address that the 2012 Elections was “by far the most credible, transparent, free and fair since 1992.”

The introduction of this new line of argument by the NDC and to an extent John Mahama, as the two submitted a joint affidavit, isolates the Electoral Commission, which would now become the only respondent still insisting that the elections were perfect.

Counsel for the NDC, Tsatsu Tsikata, who introduced the new pink sheets showing irregularities in the elections in other polling stations other than what the petitioners are challenging sought to suggest with those polling stations that the petitioners did not act in good faith and had been selective in choosing the polling stations affected by irregularities.

However, counsel for the petitioners Philip Addison quickly responded and pointed out to the Judges that indeed the question of acting in bad faith could not come in because the petitioners had long stated that they had analyzed only 24,000 pink sheets out of the 26,002 polling stations nationwide.

According to a source at the NPP headquarters, the bad faith can now be attributed to the NDC who by their action today have proved that indeed they were aware of the irregularities in the elections including over voting but they kept silent because their candidate John Mahama was declared winner by the Electoral Commission.

“The claim of the NDC could not also be true because as Dr. Bawumia stated in court on Tuesday, there are over a 1,000 polling stations being challenged out of the 11,138 polling stations where the NPP’s Nana Akufo-Addo actually won. Again per the analysis of the petitioners, they are asking the court to annul 1,388,239 votes from the total votes tally of Nana Akufo-Addo while the annulments would also mean that 2,910,103 votes would have to be annulled from the total votes tally of John Mahama,” the source added.

The source continued, “Per the new argument of the NDC however, it seems the party has now opened the way for a re-run of the elections which now might have become the safest route for the party after its failure to destroy the case of the petitioners after eleven days of cross examining the main witness of the petitioners, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia.”

Source: Communications Directorate, NPP/Ghana

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Think tanks back prediction of unprecedented cedi depreciation this year

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Category: Business & Finance

Created on Tuesday, 07 May 2013 00:00

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Think tanks back prediction of unprecedented cedi depreciation this year

{sidebar id=12 align=right}The Centre for Policy Analysis and financial services provider, Gold Coast securities are warning that an imminent unprecedented fall of the cedi this year that will trigger astronomical increases in prices of goods.

The two institutions confirmed a report by international business news outlet, Bloomberg, which predicted the cedi will this year fall to its lowest level yet against the US dollar since its redenomination in 2007.

The report noted that the cedi will depreciate to as low as 2 cedis to a dollar by the end of 2013.

Currency Analyst with Gold Coast Securities, Kofi Ampaw said “we were expecting that at least the cedi will hold on to its value loss against the dollar this year but unfortunately the trend has continued”.

“And it is very worrying…the country as at the moment is importing a lot more and exporting less so it is going to happen.”

Dr. Joe Abbey, the Executive Director of the Centre for Policy Analysis, also stated that the predicted fall in the cedi will have a devastating effect on the economy.

“…We are not growing this economy and we are spending too much time doing politics…”

He warned that “if we go on like this, it could be worse than your two cedis to the dollar.”

From: Joy Business

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Electoral Commission Puts The Brakes On Ghana's Democracy Project

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Category: Politics

Created on Tuesday, 07 May 2013 00:00

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Electoral Commission Puts The Brakes On Ghana's Democracy Project

{sidebar id=12 align=right}The belief in the power of institutions as a check on individual excesses, especially in the domain of politics goes back to antiquity. This is Brutus on the occasion of the coronation of his best friend, Julius Caesar:

Crown him that, and then, I grant, we put a sting in him, That at his will he may do danger with. The abuse of greatness is, when it disjoins Remorse from power; and, to speak of conscience, Caesar, compassion I have not known when his affections swayed more than his reason.

It is this same belief in the power of institutions as opposed to individuals in enhancing democratic governance which led President Barack Obama to admonish the Ghanaians during his visit to the country to strive to build stronger institutions to safeguard our nascent Democracy which was at that point becoming the envy of the world.

As a sociologist, I am keenly aware that a cardinal sin in my discipline is what is conventionally referred to as "psychological reductionism". In plain English, this sin is committed when explanations of "social" phenomena are sought in "psychological" processes. This essence of the discipline was aptly captured by one of its founding fathers, Emile Durkheim, in the following assertion: "only the universal is rational; the particular and concrete baffle understanding".

I dare say that no keen observer of the evolution of our democracy can fail to see that the ghost of the NDC individualist dispositions has been haunting every institution in the polity that ideally seeks to strengthen the democratic project we are building as a nation. This situation suggests that the entire edifice of the 1992 Constitution which engendered the creation of certain key institutions must be interrogated and possibly amended to ensure a normal developmental trajectory for our Democracy.

While one can cite several examples of institutions that refuse to be strengthened because of the calibre of the individuals who man them, my focus in this article is the Electoral Commission (EC) whose acts of commission and omission during the December 2012 general elections have now thrown our democracy project in great doubt to the chagrin of the international community.

Like many of our present so-called democratic institutions, the EC is a creation of the NDC via the 1992 Constitution. While the 1992 Constitution guarantees the independence of this institution, it is everything but independent. The essence of this independence is the emphasis on the importance of this institution in the development of multiparty democracy in the African continent (In fact, in South Africa the adjective, "independent" is included in the name of the entity, “The Independent Electoral Commission”).

However, our experience in Ghana is that since 1992 we have allowed the flawed characters of certain EC officials, their lack of vision, their personal political preferences and general incompetence to dictate the development of this vital institution to the point where the institution has now lost the credibility and integrity which are the sine qua non of its existence.

But I must hasten to say that in the gradual destruction of the Electoral Commission, a section of the Fourth Estate (the Media) has been equally culpable. I am speaking here specifically of the role of the rented media in preventing the strengthening of our institutions of democracy.

The role of the media in this instance has been manifested in several ways but the one clear manifestation was how some media houses chose to vilify politicians who foresaw the destruction of the EC through the shenanigans of these flawed characters in the run up to the December 2012 general elections.

Specifically, when the former MP for Asokwa, Honorable Kofi Jumah, drew the nation's attention to how the institution was being bastardized under its current chairman, he was written off as a charlatan by the NDC rented media. In underscoring the chairman's incompetence, Honourable Kofi Jumah alluded to the fact that whatever positive development that had taken place at the Commission until the eve of the 2012 elections had been foisted on the Chairman of the Commission by the official Opposition (NPP) and such pressure groups as Alliance for Accountable Government (AFAG) rather than coming through his own initiative.

These developments ranged from transparent ballot boxes to the biometric voting system and its concomitant verification. Conversely, whenever it came to doing things that would pose a threat to the social cohesion that is necessary for nurturing our Democracy, the Chairman always did them with alacrity: his insistence on creating 45 new constituencies with only three months to the crucial elections, his initial opposition to the whole idea of biometric voting, his inability to account for nearly 300,000 dubious overseas votes and countless other acts of omissions and commissions which all suggested his debt to the party which brought him into office in the first instance.

What the Electoral Commission has done goes beyond the flawed characters of the few officials who might be gaining materially from their actions. The so-called mistakes which they are now attributing to the casual workers they engaged during the elections, goes to the very heart of the development of the stripe of democracy the entire continent has been striving to build in the last several years under the auspices of the African Union (AU).

Why do I say this? As a people, Ghanaians were slowly but inexorably coming to accept the ballot as the only legitimate means of mandating a group of people to govern them every four years. This acceptance of the ballot largely explains the equanimity with which all sides of the political divide accepted the outcome of the 2008 elections despite its closeness in our history.

It also explains the patience the electorate had for the NDC misrule in the past 4 years when very young men and women displayed naked power, wealth and arrogance. Finally, the acceptance of the ballot explains the continuing patience with the laid down grievance procedure which the opposition NPP has chosen to follow in the face of compelling evidence of the worst electoral fraud in our history.

It is within this context of the acceptance of the sanctity of the ballot by the Ghanaian electorate that we should measure the irreparable damage the EC has done to our Democracy as a result of its gross incompetence. The pertinent question to ask at this juncture is: Are Ghanaians going to trust the electoral system from now on and strive to register and vote in their numbers again after being dealt the unnecessary psychological blow that after all their thumbprints no longer matter in effecting a change or otherwise of a government?

You see, like many other Ghanaians in the diaspora, I used my own money to travel from South Africa to come and register in April and again in November 2012 to come and vote. I did all this because like every Ghanaian, I believed that after years of military adventurism and misrule and five successive democratic elections I could trust the system to deliver a verdict which would be reflective of my will as a citizen and of course that of the majority of the people. But, alas, I was dead wrong and instead I was taken for a big ride by crooks and criminals who were prepared to sacrifice the greater good of the country on the altar of self interests.

If the EC officials were not incompetent how could such educated people not reason that at the end of the day the number of registered voters would be less and not more as a result of deaths (and not births in this particular instance) and apathy of those who registered to vote in the population? This is commonsensical and does not even require any formal educational qualifications to know. It is within this context of the irreparable damage to our young democracy that the mafia that runs the Electoral Commission must not only resign but must be prosecuted for crimes against the state.

Professor Acheampong Yaw Amoateng PhD, is a Senior Researcher with the Centre for Sociological Research, University of Johannesburg, South Africa.

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