Limited voter registration, waste of tax payers' money - PPP

One of Ghana’s opposition parties says the country’s ongoing limited registration exercise is a “waste of scarce resources”.

The youth wing of the Progressive Peoples’ Party said in a statement on Monday that: “This biometric registration exercise amounts to a duplication and by extension, a waste of the tax payers’ money.”

“It demonstrates lack of coordination in public policy decision-making and causing financial loss to the State,” the statement signed by National Youth Coordinator Divine Nkrumah said.

The 10-day exercise is meant to give fresh voters the opportunity to register ahead of the 2016 elections.

But the group says: “The basis for this position of the PPP is that, the State had already invested millions of dollars to have all Ghanaians aged six and above, bio-metrically registered under the National Identification System.”

“The NIA project is not only to establish a National Register, which will serve as a single source of credible population-related data for national development, but it is to provide a key transformational platform for integrating and redefining public and private sector service delivery approaches. It was to create a central database of all Ghanaians with unique National Identification Numbers for the easy and effective identification in the utilisation of public services,” the group noted.

The party says it “believes that in the interest of effective coordination and judicious use of scare resource, the EC must take full advantage of the database of the NIA to achieve the same objective of properly identifying the qualified and unqualified voter,” adding that: “There is no need to spend additional resources to generate information which already exist with the NIA.”

“The NIA project was to establish a primary database that allows other institutions of State such as the Electoral Commission, Driver & Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA), the Police Service, Immigration Service, Passport Office, SSNIT, Birth & Death Registry and Commercial Banks to utilise for the purposes of identification,” the group said.

“We humbly appeal to the good offices of the Chairman and all stakeholders of the EC to intervene to halt this biometric registration and collaborate with the NIA for the same information the EC seeks to collate. We should all join forces to appeal to the government to let the NIA make the identification exercise see the light of day.”