Claims of missing equipment by EC a decoy to spend money – Franklin Cudjoe warns

Franklin Cudjoe, president of IMANI Africa, has urged the Finance Ministry and the Parliament of Ghana to disregard the Electoral Commission’s claims of missing biometric devices for voter registration.

He says it is a decoy to declare the remaining machines compromised and set a procurement opportunity to waste money we don’t have on purchasing new machines.

Franklin Cudjoe says the commission used the same strategy in 2020, but that should not be countenanced this year.

To him, it’s fiction, which should not be given a listening ear because the EC wants to use their rigging procurement process to procure new machines.

Read His Post Below

Parliament and the Finance Ministry should be careful with EC’s Spending Plans in 2024.

Ghana’s Electoral Commission is at its prancing and pranking best again. Having earned the dubious accolade of ‘ Voting mafioso’ for clandestinely disenfranchising my people in Santrokofi Akpafu, Likpe and Lolobi on the eve of the last election in 2020, I was warming up to their recent calmness in accommodating sensible views of political parties on issues such as the use of indelible ink and closing polls at 5pm instead of the jocular and amateurish contrary views they held.

I knew something wasn’t quite right with the EC’s turnaround. It was just not in their DNA to be this graceful.

And voila- the EC surreptitiously reported to a parliamentary inquiry that it had lost some biometric voter machines that were procured by rigging procurement process, leaving the country with a needless total bill of $150m in 2020- which the IMF has now accepted contributed to our economic atrophy.

Sadly, we never heard the EC report the missing biometric voter machines to the Police until an innocuous question at a parliamentary hearing revealed this fiction yesterday.

Please, Parliament and the Finance Ministry, must ignore the EC. Claims of missing biometric voting machines is a decoy to declare the remaining machines compromised and set a procurement opportunity to waste money we don’t have on purchasing new machines.

They did the same in 2020 by strangely discarding all biometric machines which Ghana had invested up to $60m in upgrading and successfully used to run the 2016 general elections and 2019 district elections with near-zero error rates, to purchase new overpriced biometric machines through a heavily rigged procurement process.

Franklin Cudjoe.

Background

The Electoral Commission of Ghana, at a press briefing, addressed issues about missing biometric machines.

The commission indicated that it had only lost five laptops and is working with the security agencies to find suspects and deal with them.

They assured the public of their commitment to a free and fair election.

“What we said was that five laptops are missing. We are working with the security agencies to arrest and prosecute the suspects. We are also hearing people asking how secure are your systems.

“We want to assure each and every one and the good people of our country that our systems are secured and very robust. We are going to organize another transparent, credible election, which will go down as one of the best.

“Anyone who thinks that there’s a problem, we are convinced and certain that all our systems are secured and we are ready for the activities of the year.”