PARTIES FACE BAN

Charlotte Osei, Ghana's Electoral Commissioner

By Ekow Mensah

Several political parties in Ghana may be on the road to extinction if the Electoral Commission (EC) carries out its threat of auditing them.

Sources at the EC say that the Commission is carrying out an audit to determine the continued qualification of the parties for registration.

Many of the registered political parties have failed to submit their audited accounts to the EC as is required by law.

Article 14 (a) of the 1992 Constitution says that “Political parties shall be required by law to declare to the public their revenue and assets and to publish to the public annually their audited accounts.”

The parties have also failed to meet the constitutional requirement of being active at least in two thirds of the districts of Ghana.

Article 7(b ) of the 1992 Constitution stipulates that the parties need to satisfy the EC that they have “branches in all the regions of Ghana and are, in addition organized in not less than two thirds of the districts in each region….”

The EC is said to have informed some of the political parties about its impending actions already.

Political parties which appear to be threatened by the intended actions of the EC include the Peoples National Convention (PNC), the Convention Peoples Party (CPP), the United Ghana Movement (UGM), the National Democratic Party (NDP), the National Reform Party (NRP) and the United Front Party (UFP).

EDITORIAL

VOTERS REGISTER

The noise about the compilation of a new voters register is difficult to understand.

If the New Patriotic Party (NPP) claims that it has come by some modern technology which can identify non- Ghanaians on the voters register, then we should just use that technology to clean up the register.

Why do we have to go through the long and expensive process of compiling a new register when we can just remove undesirable names.

 In any case, Ghana has had to virtually compile a new voter’s register after every election and that has not cured what the NPP calls the credibility problems of the register.

 The Insight believes that the compilation of a new voters’ register would not improve anything as past exercises have proven.

 The way forward lies in cleaning up the old register.