Ghana must start rejecting foreign election observer missions – Prof Gyampo

Professor Ransford Gyampo of the Political Science Department at the University of Ghana says it is time for Ghana to stop inviting foreign observer missions when general elections are held.

According to him, Ghana has consistently shown that as a transitional democracy, our system has and continues to grow steadily with each electoral cycle, arguing further that, all that foreign observer missions do is to reiterate issues that local observer missions have articulated.

GhanaWeb monitored submissions that he made on Joy FM’s news program 'Top Story' on Thursday while contributing to discussions about the recently released European Union Election Observer Mission's (EU EOM) final report on the 2020 elections.

“I think as a country we must start kicking against foreign observer missions because they don’t say anything new that we don’t know already.

“They don’t say anything that important local election observation missions like the Coalition of Domestic Election Observers (CODEO) have said that they keep saying and is reported on. And so, I think as we are growing our democracy, we must begin to place much emphasis on our own, our local election observer missions and what they say.”

He stressed further that bodies like the EU EOM hardly say anything new in their reports anyway: “I don’t see anything that the EU observer mission has said that we don’t know already.”

According to him, given that democracies cannot be consolidated in perpetuity, it was time to look within for crucial recommendations which we already know, thanks to highly skilled local groups.

He is quick to add that though consolidated democracies could experience retrogression, stagnation or in some cases progress, in the case of Ghana, our growth trajectory is there for all to see.

The EU EOM report has split opinion between the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC).

The former are hailing the report as a true reflection of the events that marked the last elections whiles the latter have threatened to petition Brussels over the content of the report saying it was biased and compromised to 'whitewash' the image of President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.