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| Dr Mahamudu Bawumia |
By
Ekow Mensah
It
is obvious that a large part of the Ghanaian media is deliberately setting up
Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, Vice Presidential candidate of the New Patriotic Party (NPP)
for attack and humiliation.
The content of his
last Tuesday press conference have been twisted to make him sound illogical and
sometimes confused.
Nowhere in the statement he made to the media, did Dr
Bawumia claim that there are more than 70,000 Togolese on Ghana’s voters’
register.
What Dr Bawumia said was that an NPP sponsored team “set out
to compare Ghana’s voters register with those of neighbouring countries and the
results were astonishingly alarming”.
The Daily Graphic of Wednesday, August 19, 2015 quoted him
as saying “… with copies of Togo’s voter’s register and that of Ghana, the team
used biometric facial recognition technology and found potential matches of
76,286 names on both registers”.
Indeed what Bawumia says conclusively is that 76,286 persons
on Togo’s electoral register look like the same number of people on Ghana’s
register.
He does not say that those 76,286 people are also on Ghana’s
voters register. All he says is that the two set of people look alike.
Dr Bawumiah does not also say that the 76,286 people are
Togolese or Ghanaian.
In any case, even if
he said that they were Togolese there could not be any problem with that given
the fact that the constitution of Ghana allows Ghanaian -Togolese to vote in
national elections.
Article 8(1) of the 1992 constitution states that “ A
citizen of Ghana may hold the citizenship of any other country in addition to
his citizenship of Ghana”.
The only
disqualification of Ghanaians with dual citizenship are spelt out in Article
8(2) which reads as follows,” without prejudice to article94 (2) of the constitution,
no citizen of Ghana shall qualify to be appointed as a holder of any office
specified in this clause if he holds the citizenship of any other country in
addition to his citizenship of Ghana.
a)
Ambassador or High Commissioner
b)
Chief of Defence Staff or any Service Chief
c)
Secretary to the Cabinet
d)
Inspector General of Police
e)
Commissioner, Custom, Excise and Preventive
Service
f)
Director
of Immigration Service and
g)
Any
office specified by an act of Parliament.
Ghana’s electoral process is not offended by people who look
like Togolese or persons with dual citizenship registering in two countries.
In any case even if all that Dr Bawumia alleges are true,
why can’t the Electoral Commission use its own methods to clean up the
register?
Why should Ghana go through all the expense of compiling a new
voter’s register when we can just simply clean up the old one?
Is there any guarantee that a new voter’s register will
still not have the credibility problems which Dr Bawumia alleges?
There is something curious about the voters registers
exhibited by Dr Bawumia.
The Ghana register has the names of voters, their identity
numbers, ages and more.
Strangely, the Togo
register exhibited by Dr Bawumia has only the identity number of the voters.
Did somebody remove
the other details and why?
Editorial
ELECTORAL
REFORMS
That
it is the duty of every and any Ghanaian to ensure that the right of citizens to
choose their leaders is not subverted cannot be over emphasized.
The 1992 constitution makes it the duty of all Ghanaians to
uphold this fundamental right.
It is therefore appropriate for the New Patriotic Party (NPP)
or any other political party to make suggestions for improving the electoral
process in Ghana.
However such endeavour ought to respect facts and provide
cogent reasons for the reforms which are put forward.
In our view the NPP has failed to make a good case for the
compilation of an entirely new voters register.
The claim that some Ghanaian voters may look like Togolese
is not sufficient reason for compiling a new voters’ register.
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