Ghana: Asiedu Nketia admits registering minors and foreigners

Johnson Asiedu Nketia,

The National Democratic Congress (NDC) has admitted registering minors and foreigners to enable them to vote in elections in Ghana. Even though the NDC had previously denied claims that the party brings in foreigners and minors to register and vote in Ghana’s elections, its General Secretary, Johnson Asiedu Nketia, has eventually admitted that indeed, the ruling party does register minors and that other parties are equally guilty of the offence. NDC activists have confirmed that they brought people they claimed to be their cousins and relatives from Togo, Cote d’Ivoire and Burkina Faso to register in the just-ended limited voter registration exercise organised by the Electoral Commission (EC).

The NDC Volta Regional Youth Organiser, Egypt Kobla Kudoto, without any remorse, boastfully said on Citi Fm last week that the party had been registering people he claimed were their cousins resident in Togo, saying that given the chance, they would do that over and over again.

The opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) has always accused the NDC of bribing foreigners and minors to register and vote during the country’s elections – part of the reasons it called for a new register going into the 2016 general election, as the current electoral roll is bloated.

Even though the EC has declined the proposal and offered to clean the register with a process nobody seems to be sure of, the Supreme Court has ordered it to clean it ahead of this year’s elections by removing dead voters as well as people who registered previously with the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) cards.

In an interview with Accra-based Joy FM last Friday, Asiedu Nketia dropped the bombshell: “We are the people who create the problems and we turn to blame the Electoral Commission,” even though he tried to generalize it by accusing all the political parties of doing same.

The confession came on the heels of claims by an official of the EC at Tamale in the Northern Region, Jocelyn Techi, last Friday that the NDC was attempting to register minors in the limited voter registration exercise in the area.

According to the EC official who spoke to Starr FM, members of the NDC who were pushing to register the minors were also threatening to beat up agents of the NPP who were protesting the action, resulting in some commotion at the Sakasaka registration centre.

But according to the NDC General Secretary, “Most of the problems are created by the political parties; their desire to outwit each other, their desire to get unfair advantage over their counterpart. “That is why I always have problems when all the blame is being heaped on the Electoral Commission.

There is no way the EC by itself can conduct such exercise without the cooperation of political party agents.” Asked why that should be the practice, his answer was, “Because it is a contest for power.” That, he said, was because “The very party people who will be calling on the Electoral Commission to remove names of aliens and minors from the register, when the opportunity comes for registration to be done, these are the very parties who will go and pick aliens and line them up to have their names on the register in a bid to get advantage over each other.”

 In view of that he advocated, “There ought to be circumstances that make cheating very punishable or expensive [so that] there will not be any motivation to cheat. “If you have a situation where there is reluctance either on the part of state institutions or Electoral Commission or anybody to punish electoral offences as some of us have been calling for…, you will continue to have this type of problem.” .

 An obviously shocked national youth organiser of the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), Sammi Awuku, could not fathom Asiedu Nketia’s rationalisation of what is supposed to be a criminal offence. “We are shocked; we are saddened by this development. We do not subscribe to the notion that the General Secretary of the ruling party is saying that we all bus foreigners and minors,” he insisted.

Instead, Awuku emphasised, “It’s been our considered position that Ghanaian elections are for Ghanaians and that is why no matter our relationship with our neighbouring countries, we have always maintained that when it comes to choosing a leader, who becomes a Member of Parliament or who becomes the president of our country, that person deserves to vote if you are a Ghanaian and so we have not engaged in it and we will not engage in it.”

 If that was so, he asked rhetorically, “Then why will the NPP be championing a new voter register?”  Mr Awuku therefore stressed the need for the General Secretary of the NDC to be arrested and questioned because according to him, “from where he stands, he seems to know a lot about what is happening – this cross-border crime.”

He however said, “We will not be surprised if he is not invited because there seems to be a deliberate collusion between the powers-that-be and the top management of the security agencies.” That, he said, was because “if it [what Asiedu Nketia said] came from the mouth of an opposition activist, you would see the national security apparatus descending heavily with the coercive machinery of the state.”

The NPP youth leader was of the belief that parties like the NDC which relies on the votes of foreigners and minors do so because they know Ghanaians would not vote for them. He stated that in the NPP, “We are sure of the work we have done in the country; we are sure of the socio-economic conditions currently prevailing in our country and we believe that Ghanaians have already rejected this government.

We do not need to get votes from Togo, Mali, Burkina Faso or Ivory Coast to shore up our numbers. “We believe that this election, regardless of the people they are trying to bus in and out, the people of Ghana will demonstrate through the ballot box that they’ve rejected this government.”