Greater Accra Regional Chairman of the National Democratic Congress, Joseph Ade Coker has quizzed the rationale behind the reversion of the logo of the Electoral Commission of Ghana to the previous following appointment of new commissioners.

The role of the Commission will still be very evidently clear even without a logo to identify it, Mr. Coker chimed.

He therefore believes it is a complete waste of time and resource that commissioners of the institution will be going forth and back about which logo (old or new) to use.

“What are the core values of the electoral commissioner? Don’t we all know the core values of the Electoral Commission? Even without the logo, everybody will know what the Electoral Commission stands for. We know that every four years, somebody must manage our electoral process and we’ve got an institution which will call the Electoral Commission whom we’ve mandated to be the body that oversees all the electoral processes in this country”.

He added, “Your mother in the village or your grandfather in the village, when it’s time to vote, do they go and show them the logo for the logo to talk to them? Why do we waste our time and resources?”.

Speaking on Citi TV’s ‘Big Issue’ Saturday on the recent change of logo by the newly elected Electoral Commissioner, Mr. Coker said the move was quite unnecessary and uneconomical. He maintains that the monies being used for this change will have done a lot more for the Commission if it were channeled into other areas where resources and monies are needed.

“The Electoral Commissioner has a lot of things to do, sooner or later, they’ll come and tell us that they don’t have money. Government has not been able to resource them and they’ll go to other institutions to go and get money and so the little money they’ve got, with this. Remember there are all these ballot boxes with this new logo on, now do we have to discard all those boxes and get new ones for boxes all over the country? Have you taken into consideration the cost?”

“What I’m interested in is that the Electoral Commission is transparent and fair and organize our elections, let’s be very serious in the country”, he charged.

Member of Parliament for Gomoa West, Alexander Abban who was co-panelist on the show however disagreed with Mr. Coker’s stance. He argued that the function of the logo cannot be underplayed; if it did he said, it will essentially imply that all other national symbols are needless and must be scrapped.

“What is the business of logo, what is the business of our Coat of Arms? Do people not know Ghana? If you are saying that people know what the EC stands for and so the logo means nothing, if we extrapolate that into our country, it means our flag will mean nothing, our Coat of Arms will mean nothing, Our Coat of Arms that constantly reminds us of our identity, who we are, what we strive for”

“In the same way, if I’m an outsider and I’m coming from outside and I see the logo, it should tell me something. It should tell me what the business of these people who have this logo do and you see that we have somebody who is casting a ballot, we have the Coat of Arms, and the core values are also in there”, he sated.