Thumbs Up For Vigilance

Archibald Laryea and William Dawe

The number of persons arrested over biometric registration malfeasance continues to increase, especially as we head towards the end of the exercise.

We are elated that at last the spirit of citizen vigilante is gaining grounds on the political terrain.

In all cases, it was not the police who chanced upon the anomalies but people who saw them and got the police to move in. That is the spirit and it is our wish that it would endure the times.

Before the registration exercise reached this stage, someone was arrested for registering 15 times, making us wonder how he could have reached that whopping number without being caught in the early days of the malfeasance. That could be technical beyond our ken and so we would just let sleeping dogs lie.

It is significant that the criminally minded persons are being arrested, a suggestion about how far desperate politicians can go to tilt the system in their favour regardless of the national security challenge this could pose.

The laws underpinning elections and the ongoing registration exercise are unambiguously laid out and it is amazing that people, especially politicians, would want to manipulate these standards just so they would have their way. Our anxiety is doused by the fact that being humans, we are fallible and ready to challenge the law, mostly for economic gains.

Unfortunately, the tendency to flout the law is going to send many to prison, an important lesson for those vulnerable to the machination of desperate politicians.

As we compose this commentary, two persons are being held by the Accra Central Police Station and another by the Airport Police Station over breaches of the registration regulation. Both persons were said to have been registering people in their rooms.

In other parts of the country, minors are said to have been pushed to register. These are kids who, by the time they mature into adulthood, would have been adequately introduced to lying and breaching the law.

By this commentary, we are calling on the police to investigate the breaches sufficiently and arraign the suspects for adjudication.

In their dealing with the cases, we are encouraging the security agencies to be steadfast and to do their work without fear or favour.

As for politicians with known proclivity towards interfering in the work of the police, through threats of dismissals, we are once more asking that they desist from the shameful act and allow the police, as an institution, to grow.

Let all Ghanaians be vigilante as the Electoral Commission Chairman told us because the biometric registration would not achieve its desired objective when we relax and allow desperate politicians to abuse the system through such anomalies like getting minors and foreigners to register, malfeasances which cannot be isolated by the system.