The Chairman of the National Peace Council, Most Rev. Professor Emmanuel Asante, has advised the Electoral Commission (EC) to extend the limited voter registration exercise on the country’s university campuses.
He said the move was necessary following several complaints by some students of tertiary institutions, notably the University of Ghana, of their inability to get registered.
There was only one registration centre at Ghana’s premier university when the exercise started until calls by students and the opposition NPP’s vice presidential candidate, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, forced the EC to double the number, which was still not enough to capture all the students who had wanted to have their names on the electoral roll.
Rev. Prof. Asante made the recommendation during an interview on Accra100.5FM’s breakfast show, Ghana Yensom, on Tuesday May 10, where he gave his views on the recently completed exercise, which was held from April 28 to May 8, 2016 to enable eligible Ghanaians who had not been captured as voters, to be registered ahead of presidential and parliamentary polls in November.
He told host Chief Jerry Forson: “A lot of them [university students] have not been registered. So, what I will urge the EC to do is to undertake a critical examination of what happened. On those university campuses where the students could not register for reasons that cannot be blamed on them, probably because of malfunctioning equipment, we did not calculate well, it was not well done. If they are not many, they should extend it a little longer for them so they can register.”
In his view, the universities have a lot of students, who, given that they have to divide their time between lectures, examination, and other academic activities, could not afford to remain in the long queue for long to be registered.
However, the clergyman was impressed with the exercise.
“On the whole, the exercise went well. As a teacher, I can’t say it is excellent. I can’t give an ‘A’, but it is also not a failure, so, I say that what they did was very good. It’s passable.
“In general, given what we were hearing, I can say in totality the exercise was successful. But that doesn’t mean there were no mistakes. In some areas, as you may be aware, there were disturbances, which was quite sad and should warn us of what may be in store for us in terms of the general elections ahead,” he stated.
“The Electoral Commission, security men, and the parties themselves have to be careful with regard to those skirmishes that resulted because they can bring trouble.”
Disturbances, he mentioned, included the alleged bussing of minors to polling stations, failure of party agents to follow lawful procedure in challenging registrants, and assault of persons by macho men.
He warned: “If such issues persist, they won’t help. Such isolated cases should not be treated as normal pockets of violence, but rather security agencies and stakeholders must be vigilant to forestall these for the November elections.”
Source: Ghana/AccraFM.com/100.5fm
