‘Minister for EC’ Jean Mensa up to mischief – Sly Mensah on new voters’ registration

The former boss of the National Health Insurance Scheme, Sylvester Mensah has asked Ghanaians to sit up and be vigilant about ‘schemes’ of the Electoral Commission in recent times.

Speaking to www.ghanaweb.com during protests by the Inter-Party Resistance against the new voters’ register, Mr. Mensah added his voice to arguments that the suggested new voters’ register compilation barely makes sense.

“I think that Ghanaians must wake up, the EC is up to some mischief. We now have a Minister for the Electoral Commission, not an Electoral Commissioner.”

In his view, the EC’s decision can be likened to the deletion of one’s phone contacts completely, to begin another contact and data compilation, merely because they changed their phones.

The infrastructure he says isn’t the problem, but the timing and the EC’s justification that the new data barely serves the purpose for which it was made.

“Everything is wrong, there’s no problem with the database, there is no problem with the infrastructure, the timing is absolutely absurd. Barely 9 months into an election, you don’t change your database, you don’t go back doing registration.” He said.

He further added,

“We also indicated clearly that it is common sense, that if it is the infrastructure they want to replace, nobody has a problem, even though we know there is nothing really wrong with it. We know that changing the infrastructure does not necessarily require changing the data in the database. We’ve always used the analogy of the mobile phone. If your mobile phone is faulty, and these days, we don’t change our mobile phones simply because they are faulty, we change them for the simple reason that there is a new phone and we want to migrate unto that phone.

You don’t go round each of your contacts, picking their numbers and discarding the old database, no. What you do is to migrate the data onto the new phone and you still have the same data.”

Sylvester Mensah also described the move as an attempt to introduce obstructions into the political space.

“Biodata can last over 25, 30, 50 years. There is no need changing biodata. Already I have my thumbprints in there, why would you want to take that again, it doesn’t make sense anywhere. What kind of frustration do you want to inject into the political space?”