What Jean Mensa said about independent audit of voters register in 2015 versus now

The Electoral Commission of Ghana (EC), under the leadership of its Chairperson, Jean Mensa, has rejected a demand by the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) for an independent audit of the voters register for the pending 2024 general elections.

The NDC, pointing to some errors it found in the provisional voters register for the election during the recent exhibition, has said that the audit is necessary to ensure the country goes into the election with a clean and credible register.

But the EC has been insisting that the register is credible, saying that it has worked on the issues the NDC found in it and that the voters register exhibition exercise is meant to get rid of such errors.

Despite calls from many notable Ghanaian entities and individuals for the EC to heed the demand of the NDC, it did not, leading the party to embark on its ‘Enough is Enough Demonstration’ across the length and breadth of Ghana, which gained international traction.

Reports on Jean Mensa’s position on the auditing of the voters register when she was the Executive Director of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) are now re-emerging.

Jean Mensa, when she was the boss of IEA in 2015, signed a communique urging the then Electoral Commission, led by Charlotte Osei, to show proactiveness and leadership by engaging the services of a competent, credible, and external organisation to audit the electoral roll.

The communique indicated that even though the EC is independent, it must be accountable to the people of Ghana.

“Though Article 46 of the National Constitution protects the EC from direction or control, it is nevertheless accountable to the citizens because it is a public organization which draws its funds from the Consolidated Fund,” the communique said.

It said that there were irregularities with the then voters register, which it said, “All stakeholders must work towards a consensus position on addressing these irregularities.”

It added, “What is critical is that the final output of this exercise must be a Voters Register with an acceptable margin of error.”

The then-IEA boss also indicated that the cost of managing a national crisis resulting from a flawed electoral process would be potentially higher than that of having an acceptable register.

Her positions, as can be gleaned from above, are sharply different today, when she is now the head of the EC. 

BAI/AE

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