Have confidence, trust in EC - Peace Council entreats political parties

The National Peace Council (NPC) has called on political parties and stakeholders in Ghana’s democracy to have confidence and build trust in the Electoral Commission (EC) to resolve challenges or problems with the electoral process.

It said the EC had one of the best elaborate processes to resolve any challenges associated with voters’ registration and the conduct of elections which must be used to address the concerns of any stakeholder.

“We must be careful the way and manner we portray the EC in our efforts to ensure transparency, fairness and credibility in its processes. Let us be careful not to push the EC into a situation where Ghanaians do not trust whatever the EC does,” the Executive Secretary of the NPC, George Amoh, told the Daily Graphic in an exclusive interview.

He said if the country was to have credible elections, all Ghanaians, including Civil Society Organisations (CSOs), had a role to play. “Let us use the EC’s elaborate systems and laid down procedures to address our problems or concerns,” he said.

Voters’ registration

Touching on the ongoing limited voters’ registration exercise, Mr Amoh said political parties or their agents did not have to look at the size or height of an individual to say he or she was a minor, stressing that “if you believe the person is a minor or a foreigner, use the laid down procedure to challenge the registration”.

“We do not need to fight at registration centres,” he said. Mr Amoh said all stakeholders must encourage persons qualified to register to do so instead of preventing them from registering.

He said limited issues of violence, arrests and intimidation in parts of the registration centres should not be generalised. “We should all be law-abiding and allow the systems to work,” he said, adding that the cost implications of deploying not only security personnel but political party agents was huge.

He said the country should have a conversation after the elections to address and resolve any outstanding issues.

IPAC

The Executive Secretary of the NPC said when the National Democratic Congress (NDC) returned to the Inter-Party Advisory Committee (IPAC), the forum for consensus building, it had been contributing positively to the discourse.

“We should build on this but we need to do more and we are hopeful that we will get there,” he said, touching on the NDC-EC seemingly frosty relationship. Mr Amoh said the NPC had set up a political parties trust building platform which it intended to use to address the concerns of the political parties.