Wontumi says EC is incompetent

The Ashanti Regional Chairman of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Bernard Antwi Boasiako, known in political circles as ‘Wontumi’, has accused the Electoral Commission (EC) of being inefficient.

He maintained in an interview with DAILY GUIDE that the EC’s incompetence led to about 50,000 innocent people having their names expunged from the voter register in the Ashanti Region alone.

The NPP chairman, who sounded angry and serious, therefore charged the EC to make sure that the 50,000 people whose names had been deleted from the register with the charge of multiple registrations are reinstated for peace to prevail.

He said there is no iota of truth in the EC’s claim that those 50,000 people engaged in multiple registrations, insisting that the EC should rather be blamed if indeed multiple registrations occurred during the registration period.

According to him, the NPP would not sit aloof for the EC to discriminate against those 50,000 innocent people who have not committed any crime to be denied their constitutional right to vote. This is the second time Wontumi has questioned the competence of the EC in the media. Last week, the NPP chairman exposed the EC by giving facts that seemed to discredit the EC.

The NPP capo claimed that the EC committed a huge blunder by using a wrong polling station code to register several people who had their fingerprints captured at Oforikrom in Kumasi in 2012, adding that the EC stopped the registration exercise in the area when it spotted the anomaly.

According to him, the EC called those who were affected by the anomaly to register again with supposed right polling codes later on, “and all those who went through that process have had their names expunged from the register for indulging in multiple registrations because their fingerprints were captured again by the machine.”

He said there were several unpardonable blunders committed by the EC with regard to polling station codes at several polling stations at the Oforikrom and Asawase Constituencies, all in Kumasi in 2012, which could cause multiple registration of individuals.

The NPP chairman argued that the explanation given by him clearly shows that if there are indeed wide reports of multiple registrations in the register, then the fault should be placed right at the doorstep of the EC and not the innocent people.

Wontumi said during his recent tour of the Atonsu Electoral Area, he realised that about 438 innocent people would have their names expunged from the register for registering at a wrong time, which is also known as ‘exclusion.’

He explained that the time on the machines for registration was set at pm instead of am by the EC officials, so the 438 people who registered at that centre would have their names automatically rejected by the EC’s central system for registering at a wrong time.

Again, he claimed that at a centre at the Atonsu Electoral Area the EC’s machine developed a fault so the people were given a ten-day extension to register in 2012, noting that this set of people also had their names rejected by the EC’s central system.

Wontumi said if the EC commits such unpardonable blunders, it should be bold and accept its faults and find other solutions to them and rather stop its infamous decision of forcibly taking the voting rights of those innocent people.

The NPP chairman also blamed the EC of Cote d’Ivoire for playing a role in throwing the country into turmoil recently, adding that Ghana’s EC almost destroyed Ghana’s peace by organising one of the poorest elections in the country’s history in 2012.

The NPP chairman stated emphatically that if care is not taken the peace in the country might be destroyed in 2016 because of the EC’s gross incompetence.