EC skewing Legon registration in favour of NDC – Jinapor

The Electoral Commission (EC) of Ghana is deliberately disenfranchising students of the University of Ghana to the disadvantage of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), a member of the party, Samuel Abu Jinapor, has indicated.

The former aide to NPP flagbearer Nana Addo was of the firm belief that it was not by accident that the EC to set up only one centre on campus in the ongoing voter registration exercise which ends Sunday May 8.

“The EC is giving us cause to believe that somehow or rather it is positioning itself to skew the registration process,” he noted on The Big Issue, a news analysis programme on Saturday May 7.

He told the host, Umaru Sandah, that: “If you conduct elections today in Ayawaso West Wuogon constituency [which covers the University of Ghana] and the NPP does not win in the university in the manner that it did in previous elections, NPP will lose that seat.”

He further explained that: “When one studies the dynamics and demographics and electoral results in the past from the constituency, with a lower voter turnout in Legon and defeat of NPP in Legon, the NDC [National Democratic Congress] will win the seat,” hence the efforts of the EC to reduce the number of fresh voters.

Citing an example to buttress his point he noted that “if people are disenfranchised in the Volta Region, it will be to the disadvantage of the NDC and the same thing is what is happening at the Legon campus”, which will weaken the NPP ahead of the elections in the constituency if nothing is done.

According to him, he finds it absurd “how it could be possible that in planning the limited voter registration exercise, the places where one expects the highest number of registrants which is tertiary institutions, particularly University of Ghana, could have just one registration centre”.

In a related development, the Greater Accra Regional Director of the Electoral Commission (EC), Kwame Amoah, has revealed that the commission has added one more registration centre to speed up registration at the University of Ghana, Legon.

“At the moment, at Legon for instance, we have doubled the team there. We have added another team at the Jubilee Hall and monitoring how it will go. With one centre the pressure was very high, that is why we added another one,” he told Class FM’s Nabil Ahmed Rufai on Friday May 6, two days to the end of the registration process.

This followed widespread complaints from students and Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, the vice-presidential candidate of the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP). Dr Bawumia, while addressing a group of journalists at the Legon Hall registration centre on his monitoring tour Thursday May 5, indicated that the slow process arising from the availability of only one centre on campus “was practical disenfranchisement of the students”.

The President of the Students’ Representative Council (SRC) of the university, Davis Ohene Fobih, also addressed a news conference on Thursday May 5 and indicated that some eighty per cent of eligible students had not registered due to the long queues that had characterised the only centre in the institution.

They requested the EC to provide two more registration centres on campus to enable more students to complete the process to be captured on the electoral roll.