Blame Bawumia for voter roll brouhaha – Anyidoho

Deputy General Secretary of the governing National Democratic Congress (NDC) Koku Anyidoho has said Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, the running mate to the New Patriotic Party’s flagbearer for the 2016 elections, should be blamed for the brouhaha over Ghana’s register of voters.

He claimed Dr Bawumia was the first to raise concerns over the credibility of the register of voters ahead of the 2016 election, prompting the former People’s National Convention Youth Organiser and one Evans Nimako to take the Electoral Commission (EC) to court to clean the register.

The Supreme Court subsequently ruled that names of those who registered with National Health Insurance Cards should be deleted from the register and given another opportunity to register again using the acceptable form of identification.

With the EC even yet to begin the process of reregistering those whose names have been deleted from the register, Mr Anyidoho has heaped the blame for the development at the feet of Dr Bawumia and has charged the media to hold him accountable.

Speaking on the Executive Breakfast Show (EBS) on Class 91.3FM Friday July 15, Mr Anyidoho said: “This whole brouhaha about the voter’s register…how did it start? It started with a certain Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, running mate to Nana Akufo-Addo, NPP flagbearer. It was he who out of his own volition decided to hold a press conference about a year and a half ago at the Alisa Hotel and put it out that they had gone to do some work in Togo and they had found out that so many Togolese happened to be on the Ghanaian voter’s register and that Volta Region in particular was the worst culprit and that in his possession was a document which was 10 per cent of work in progress and that in a matter of two weeks the NPP or he, Bawumia, and his team were going to produce the extra 90 per cent to give their case very solid legs to stand on and that the other 90 per cent was going to come from Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire , Niger, and other countries.”

He told host Prince Minkah: “Based on that 10 per cent of work in progress, they started making noise all over the place, then all the surrogate groups came up – Let My Vote Count Alliance, OccupyGhana, IMANI name them – and suddenly the whole country is caught in a web of this voter’s register issue...

“They were hounding the EC, so the EC decides to hold a forum live on national television. At that forum, Bawumia was not present, Mac Manu represented the NPP, and at that event they were not able to provide a shred of credible evidence to back their claims; after that the hounding even intensified.

“To cut a long story short, they ended up at the Supreme Court and they went there of their own volition, nobody forced them. They claimed doing all the noise they were making that they had a list of four million people who had registered with the NHIS cards, the four million moved to seven million…and they kept confusing people like you in the media... They go to the Supreme Court, they are asked to provide evidence and they cannot produce one name, so why is the media not going back to ask Bawumia that: ‘Bawumia, you deceived us because you have still not produced 90 per cent of the work you promised us and so, today, Ghanaian media, we are demanding of you, Bawumia, bring us the 90 percent of work in progress or forget it.’

“…So the media, I am challenging you, go and ask Bawumia to produce the evidence, the 90 per cent, or he must not come and tell us he wants to be vice-president because we are looking for political leaders we can trust and not political leaders who will use lies and deceit to want to win political power.”