Clean The Filthy Register

With an Electoral Reform Committee now functional, we want to believe that the journey towards restoring confidence in the voting system has begun.

It is a reluctant response to a concern raised by a broad spectrum of Ghanaians with a stake in a decent electoral system, one which can be trusted to work without stains of a certain lock manufacturing company hanging over its integrity.

It is only a hope and we want to be fully convinced that sincerity will underpin the work of the committee and that at the end of the day when the report on the body's findings is submitted to the relevant authority, action that would restore confidence in the Electoral Commission (EC) would be achieved.

We cannot ask for less in a country which is so polarised that things can work for you in certain state circles only if you are a card-bearing member of the ruling party.

The Herculean task staring the EC in the face today is the confidence it has lost among a large chunk of the electorate. Most actions of the commission are today taken with a pinch of salt.

For an institution which needs massive dose of confidence from the people, such a shortcoming cannot be brushed aside. The dichotomy defining local politics demands that we ensure by all means that transparency remains the rule in the management of our elections, lest the undesired erupts.

We are not in a position to countenance an avoidable post-election violence as witnessed in some parts of Africa. Let us not allow the insincerity of our race becloud our election management and retard the progress Ghana badly needs in this era of both physical and spiritual darkness.

One of the biggest tasks of the EC, and now the committee charged with working on reforms in our electoral system, is the bloated electoral register. The register, the cornerstone of every clean and un-blemished election, is anything but acceptable in its current form. It forms the basis of all the fuss about a limping electoral system. The need therefore to disabuse the minds of the electorate about this shortcoming lies in firstly ensuring that the register which represents the true electoral demography of the country is devoid of blemish.

A situation where some portions of the country known to have sparse populations posting phantom figures simply because of a compromise of sorts between some EC bigwigs and parties as alleged by worried Ghanaians, should find an amicable closure.

In an ICT-driven world, cleaning the filthy register is not an unfeasible task. Better to spend money to clean the register than blow money in dousing the fire of disaffection and dissent.