EC, IMANI fight: Serve Ghanaians with accountability by constituting a higher authority to probe them — Nana Akomea

Nana Akomea, the Chief Executive Officer of the InterCity State Transport Corporation (STC), has called for the establishment of a Committee of Inquiry to thoroughly investigate the ongoing controversy between the Electoral Commission (EC) and IMANI Africa regarding the disposal of election-related equipment.

IMANI Africa, a prominent policy think tank, recently petitioned the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) to probe the EC's disposal and auctioning of what it deemed obsolete equipment.

Franklin Cudjoe, the Executive Director of IMANI, on May 6, accused the EC of misappropriation, wastage, and misuse of state resources.

He further accused the EC of lack of compliance with data handling and protection standards.

"We do not believe that the EC and its commercial counterparties in these transactions complied with the highest standards of data handling and protection required in the transfer and/or disposal of such sensitive equipment. At any rate, none of them had the requisite certifications to be trusted with such a task,” he said.

The institution's statement further suggested that "the EC’s most recent conduct has been necessitated by a need to curtail transparency and accountability, and thus was motivated by a collective conflict of interest and potential corruption. By its actions, it is attempting to erase inventory records and physical evidence of the blatant falsehoods it has told over the last four years regarding the purchase history of expensive electoral equipment.

“We asserted our longstanding claim that the EC’s electoral equipment is a portfolio of multiple items, bought and refurbished at different intervals between 2011 and 2019. That portfolio does not uniformly date to 2011 or 2012 as the EC has falsely and persistently claimed, and could thus not be so uniformly obsolete as to warrant a firesale to mysterious bidders, who have kept the prime portions for themselves and discarded the rest to be used as scrap. Ghana cannot continue to be milked in this fashion.”

Reacting to this escalating controversy, Nana Akomea proposed the formation of a Committee of Inquiry comprising representatives from both the EC and IMANI.

He said, “The Committee should televise the proceedings so that at the end of the day, the important thing is that probity and accountability is served for Ghanaians to know which party is telling the truth or otherwise.”