EC Must Listen

Dr Afari Gyan, EC Boss
The integrity of the 2016 elections cannot be compromised. Any question mark over the quality of polls that would be conducted by the Electoral Commission (EC) in the year referred to can push the country to an avoidable abyss.

The integrity of the EC has never been so much on the lips of anxious Ghanaians, who demand none of the blemishes which stained the last elections, than now.

Those who did not see clearly that the country was boiling after the declaration of the winner of the polls do not have eyes for such conditions. It was a close shave with a state of anarchy, but for the maturity of one political leader who used the courts to calm agitated tempers.

With the judgment of the Supreme Court on the election petition hearing failing to inure the people to the judiciary, the refrain now is 'no more court for election disputes'. There could be trouble if there is a repeat of what happened during the last elections in 2016.

It is for this reason that the first anniversary of the despicable Supreme Court ruling on the election petition hearing was characterised by near thunderous yearnings for electoral reforms.

There has not been a dissenting view yet for such changes needed to give a facelift to the rigging-friendly electoral system and we can bet there would hardly be any.

The electoral system, dynamic as it is, should have improved over the years and gone past the stage where rigging is a near impossibility. It is the apprehension spawned by the possible compromise of the electoral system which has turned the heat on a stubborn EC which is abusing its so-called constitution-given independence.

We support the call by
Even when the Supreme Court ordered rather lamely, electoral reforms following the challenges unearthed during the petition hearing, concrete steps towards that direction are yet to be seen.

We are fired up by Prof H. Kwasi Prempeh's query of the Supreme Court for not being hard enough in its demand for electoral reforms.

We are equally supportive of his position that independent constitutional bodies take their independence to mean a lack of accountability and we add intransigence, as in the case of Afari-Gyan.

Taking their independence so literally, as he observed, is the reason why Dr Kwadwo Afari-Gyan is impervious to good counsel for reforms in the electoral system.

We want to see efforts towards reforming the awful electoral system; reforms that would ensure that logistics imported by the EC are subject to public scrutiny. When new biometric machines breakdown seemingly on purpose in selected parts of the country we can only sneer at the EC.

The political parties should be engaged more than we are seeing now and the electoral register must be presented to the parties long before elections.

Above all, the electoral register must be cleaned and rid of deliberately planted ghost names. Thankfully facilities for the necessary process exist. Rigging must be eradicated from our electoral system now.

· In one of our editorials last week titled 'Still Searching', we inadvertently referred to GNPC instead of GDPC. All other issues relating our view remain the same.