EC urged to wake-up to mandate

The Governance Africa Foundation (GAfF) a think-tank on Wednesday tasked democratic stakeholders to wake-up to their constitutional mandate to maintain the sanctity of Ghana’s electoral systems.
It said the Electoral Commission (EC), National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE), the Media and other democratic institutions should join forces to manage the District Level and Unit Committee election hiccups.
“Blame the democratic bodies for the current electoral operational challenges as the governance bodies failed to educate the public on the new local government law 1967,” Mr George Odamtten, GAfF Associate Executive Director, told the Ghana News Agency in an interview in Accra.
“The late passage of the Legislative Instrument (LI) and the changes in the law created huge operational difficulty, which has resulted in the current difficulties the nation is confronted with,” he said.
Mr Odamtten called for collaboration among the stakeholders to manage the challenges instead of focusing on the problem, adding: “The talk would not resolve the problem…We need to complement each other’s effort to address the hiccups.”
He appealed to the media to consider as their democratic civic duty to broadcast the changes in the voting dates as well as encourage the electorate to turn out massively to vote.
Mr Odamtten appealed to the candidates, their agents and the electorate to check the regional voting dates and participate fully in the process.
He called on traditional, opinion and religious leaders to encourage their subjects to participate in the elections.
Delays in printing volumes of ballot papers for the 2010 District Level and Unit Committee Elections has forced the EC to periodically change the voting timetable for the 10 Regions.
Instead of holding it on Tuesday, December 28, the EC have spread it over a period of four days between Tuesday to Friday, December 31 to ensure that each district participate in the voting process.

GNA