Ghana Card C.I.: Small political parties are EC's stooges – ADAM-GH

The Executive Director of Anchoring Democratic Advocacy Movement Ghana (ADAM-GH), Mr Azubilla Salami, has taken a bite at the small political parties clamouring for the passage of the Electoral Commission’s Constitutional Instrument (C.I.) laid in parliament to make the Ghana Card a sole document for enrollment onto the Voter’s Register for the 2024 general elections.

According to him, these smaller political parties must not be taken seriously.

He said all these parties care about is building a war chest and not the interest of the people they claim to be serving.

Mr Salami took the leadership of the smaller parties on while reacting to their press conference to support the EC's C.I.

He spoke on the mid-day news on Accra100.5FM on Tuesday, March 14, 2023.

He queried the worth of smaller political parties in the country.

“What is the representation of the smaller parties in parliament? Go to Nigeria and see the kind of work smaller parties are doing there,” he challenged.

“You come to Ghana [and] all the smaller political parties care about is how to line their pockets by supporting the governing party or the EC when matters arise,” he alleged.

“They go to Inter-Party Advisory Committee (IPAC) meetings only to concur with the EC without thinking about the ordinary people in the street.

“Why will a party in a right-thinking state support a C.I. that seeks to disenfranchise the majority of Ghanaians?” he wondered.

There is a backlog of three million Ghanaians who have not been issued Ghana cards by the National Identification Authority (NIA).

He called out Hassan Ayariga, the founder and leader of the All People’s Congress (APC) for doing Ghana a disservice.

Under the new CI, the Ghana Card will be the sole identification document for voter registration – a move the National Democratic Congress (NDC) together with its Members of Parliament (MPs) have opposed stating that it will disenfranchise Ghanaians.

Addressing a press conference on Monday, March 14, 2023, General Secretary of the Great Consolidated Popular Party (GCPP), Citizen Ato Dadzie, argued that the new CI will eliminate challenges including chaos at registration centres among others.

He is, therefore, calling on MPs to back the proposed C.I. while urging the government to give the National Identification Authority more resources to enable it to register more Ghanaians onto the Ghana card database.