EC’s GHC50,000 filing fee contributed to our defeat – Ivor Greenstreet

The CPP’s presidential candidate in the just ended December polls, Ivor Kobina Greenstreet, has blamed the party’s abysmal performance in the contest on the EC’s decision to peg presidential and parliamentary filing fees at GHC50,000 and GHC10,000 respectively.

According to Mr. Greenstreet, the decision ‘unbalanced’ his party and made it difficult for the CPP to get the necessary logistics to campaign effectively.

The Electoral Commission of Ghana upped the filing fees of presidential and parliamentary candidates by a thousand percent – a situation many ‘small’ parties at the time described as a deliberate move to push them out of the contest.

Weeks down the line however, the contest saw candidates from six different political parties as well as one independent candidate satisfy the set criteria by the Electoral Commission.

It appears however that meeting the EC’s monetary requirements did more harm than good to the chances of some parties in the just ended polls.

‘What I would say unbalanced us a bit was the filing fees that we eventually had to pay to the EC’, the CPP’s Ivor Greenstreet said in an interview with GhanaWeb.

He added “…You may remember that in 2012 the filing fees for the parliamentary candidates was a GHC 1,000 so we were expecting an increase to perhaps a GHC 1,500 or GHC 2,000 – a hundred percent increase or thereabout. Unfortunately it was increased by a thousand percent to GHC10,000 so that certainly unbalanced us and created some problems with our logistics and approach.”

The outcome of the 2016 elections surprised many Ghanaians and left scores more disappointed. Many had predicted an upset by a party other than the dominant NPP and NDC but that was not meant to be as the five other contenders in the presidential race failed to collectively gather 2% of the total votes cast.