NDC on EC, Another Excuse for Losing an Election?

After the 2020 General Elections, the NDC made hell break loose, when it insisted that the presidential election was rigged in favour of the incumbent president, H.E. Nana Akufo-Addo, who was on the NPP ticket.

Well-meaning Ghanaians, advised the NDC that it should resort to the court. This was at first very hard on the opposition party, because in 2013 when NPP contested the presidential election in the Supreme Court, the NDC told Ghanaians, that any fool can go to court.

To avoid being called a fool, the NDC decided to use its youths to invade the Electoral Commission on a suicide mission, to force the reversal of the results, meanwhile the gurus of the party went to celebrate in a member’s house.

While they were feasting and making merry with the drinking of cocktails in another side of town, the story at the EC office was very different. The NDC youth were served a cocktail of tear-gas, water-canon and truncheon butting.

Finally succumbing to the national out-cry that it must go to court, just as the NPP did in 2013, the NDC took its chance, but for a different reason.

It went not to contest the electoral results but to ask the Supreme Court to compel the Electoral Commissioner to announce the results, professionally and in an office wear.

The NDC’s first witness admitted that all the results read out by the EC, were correct. Two other witnesses however insisted that the elections were rigged, but their definition of rigging was entirely new and strange. While one defined rigging as being sent from the strong room on an errand and the results announced in his absence, the other defined it as being served tea without biscuits in the EC office.

The NDC knew it lost the presidential elections and yet it threw its youths in the streets, to be beaten up for their lawlessness.

A few months to Election 2024, the EC embarked on exercises to get the voters’ register in readiness for the December 7 General Elections. The NDC raised alarm that the EC had, among some irregularities, transferred over 200,000 names without the people knowing.  The EC came out to explain that it was work in progress and that those affected had already being transferred in 2020, so there was no cause for alarm. The EC promised to let the NDC have the final product, long before Election Day, December 7, 2024. In all this, however, the NDC is not able to provide evidence to its allegations.

Is the NDC complaining about transfer of names without the people knowing? We all know what happened during the Rawlings era, when multiples of hundreds of thousands of people go to their designated polling station to vote, only to be told their names were not in the register. Some people just give up voting, while others move from polling station to polling to locate their names, but all in vain.

And all this worked in favour of the NDC.

Charlotte Osei, the immediate past Electoral Commissioner who is the darling of the NDC, gave a testimony that she chanced upon one of her deputies, uploading names unto the voters’ register in his office. Apart from the fact that this is legally wrong, the crime took place long after registration of voters had closed. This criminality has never been condemned by the NDC to this day.

Strangely, today the NDC is up and about doing the same things it had condemned the NPP and Ghanaians of, in 2015 and 2016.

It will be helpful to reproduce what Alhaji Salifu Hadara reminded us of, asNDC’s defense of the EC, during the Mahama regime.

In 2015, Ofosu Ampofo told Ghanaians that it was absurdity for the NPP to demand for auditing of the voters’ register for the 2016 General Elections. In 2016, Asiedu Nketiah, said all those who believed the EC had lost credibility, have a problem.

In 2016, John Mahama said that the consistent criticism of the EC and unspeakable things said about its chairperson, was a way that the NPP was using to prepare the minds of its supporters, that when it loses the elections, the EC could be blamed for not being neutral. He went to add that those who were saying that the EC was going to rig the election, were proclaiming absurd nonsense because the EC was one of the best in the world. He stated that people should leave the EC in peace to do its work.

All these can be summed up to say emphatically that the NDC has nothing against the EC, but it is just using these baseless allegations that should it lose the 2024 Elections, it will be blamed on the EC.

One thing to note here is that the NPP challenged the EC for using the NHIS card as a form of identity to be able to register. The NHIS card was available for both Ghanaians and non-Ghanaians, so an alien can register to vote. This was what the NDC attacked the NPP on.

I will appeal to the youth, that they should be mindful that the same NDC who pushed them to clash with security agents at the EC office in 2016, while the gurus went enjoying themselves at a party, is today pushing them into another clash.

Hon. Daniel Dugan

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect The Chronicle’s stance.

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