Another protest hits EC as Registration Supervisors cry over payment

Supervisors and Deputy Supervisors of the ongoing nationwide voters registration exercise are aggrieved over some treatments being meted out to them by the Electoral Commission (EC) as regards payment for their services.

According to the Supervisors who are being engaged for three months, the EC has been unfair in respect of rate and allowances.

The officials who spoke to GhanaWeb lamented that although their job is very demanding, they are underpaid and denied various allowances unlike the personnel they trained and supervise.

“We are disadvantaged because we supervise everything, we recruited everyone and trained them before the exercise,” one of the Supervisors said with traits of disappointment. “We work every day. We use our cars, and motorbikes, buy fuel every week for monitoring, make calls every day and every evening to these operatives on the field for report etc.”

Another supervisor who was equally displeased interjected, saying: “If we put all these and others together, it is very clear that Supervisors deserve some upward adjustment in the allowances. Currently, we are taking less than all the other operatives. Our rate is between 80 to 86.6 cedis a day for a month.”

“Moreover, Supervisors and their deputies work tirelessly after each day’s work to make sure that daily statistics are sent to the region for onward submission to headquarters. We at certain times have to leave the offices as late as 11 pm or even sleep over on some occasions, not to talk of phone calls. We visit registration centres with our own bikes and cars,” the official added.

Aside from the aforementioned concerns, the Supervisors and their deputies are calling for insurance packages as they argued that a colleague lost his life in the line of duty.

“We’ve been told that on Monday, one Aning Daniel, a teacher at Barekese Methodist JHS, former Barekese local GNAT Secretary and District GNAT Trustee lost his life at Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital. He was involved in an accident on his way to monitor the exercise at Fufuo,” recalled a Supervisor.

On July 23, the EC made public an approved rate and allowances for personnel who have been engaged in the voters registration exercise. The development came after a GhanaWeb publication which projected the plights of some registration officials. The personnel had expressed discontentment over the decision by the body to pay them an amount they described as “woefully inadequate.”

According to the memo released by the EC, Laminators are expected to be paid an amount of GHC75 per day while Data Entry Clerk and Registration Officers are to be paid GHC90 and GHC100 per day respectively.

Per the account of the registration officials as trumpeted in the GhanaWeb publication and the figures projected in the memo, there had been an increase in the rates.

But the Supervisors say: “The new rate did not factor ours as Registration Supervisors at all. Not even a pesewa was added to ours. If you compare how much the Supervisors are paid to that of the people we recruited and trained, the difference is huge and that is very unfair.