Cleaning voter roll: NIA cards panacea – PPP

The only document that defines a person as a Ghanaian is the National Identification Authority (NIA) card and that should be the only card which should be used for the voter roll, Nana Ofori Owusu, Director of Operations of the Progressive People’s Party (PPP) has advocated.

He held the opinion that if government would be committed to resourcing the authority, Ghanaians could be registered and issued the card within two weeks. The cards can then be used to register new people and clean the register by removing invalid elements, which will ensure a more credible register.

“It will not take more than 10 days to register Ghanaians for the NIA cards…if we are able to empower the NIA. Government must equip them with the resources …let us deal with it once and for all,” he noted.

Mr Owusu, who was a guest on Citi FM’s The Big Issue on Saturday May 28, told host Umaru Sanda Amadu that other forms of identification including driver’s licences were not sufficient proof that an individual was Ghanaian. He said in abiding by the Supreme Court’s ruling for the expunction of National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) card holders from the country’s register of voters, the use of the NIA cards should be prioritised.

His views resonate with that of the founder of the PPP, Dr Papa Kwesi Nduom, who said any attempts to compile a fresh register or undertake a validation of those on the existing roll will be fruitless unless it is based on information from the National Identification Authority (NIA).

“Any voters’ register that is not put together based on the NIA database is not correct and will not be correct,” he told Emefa Apawu on Class FM’s 505 news programme on Friday 15 April, 2016.

Former Executive Secretary of NIA, Prof Ernest Dumor, had suggested to the Electoral Commission in November 2015 to seek the help of the NIA in verifying voters during national elections.

“We need to think of how we can create the enabling relationship, what you call the interoperability arrangement between the Electoral Commission and the NIA to make sure that the rules of engagement are there and the data that is available to NIA will be the cross-referencing point for the EC,” stated Prof Dumor, who worked with the EC for 10 years, in an interview on Starr FM.

“The argument that the Electoral Commission is a constitutional body, and, therefore, should do it alone, for me is just absolutely unacceptable. This is the time, if we care about this country, to do everything we can to get the electoral body to deliver efficiently and effectively the services that it has been constitutionally mandated to deliver.”