Voters register will never be changed - Twum Boafo

Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Ghana Free Zones Board, Kwadwo Twum Boafo, has predicted that the New Patriotic Party's (NPP) clamor for a new voters register will end up a wild goose chase.

According to a simple piece of clairvoyance that he shared on radio, the existing voters register will never be changed by the Electoral Commission as is being demanded by the NPP and that the opposition party owes it to itself to accustom itself to that inevitability.

‘I want to make a safe prediction that the voters register will not be changed.

Mr. Twum Boafo said this on Accra-based Radio Gold’s ‘Alhaji and Alhaji’ political talk show on Saturday.

The prediction comes at a time when the NPP has appealed to world authorities, including the US Government, to pressure Ghana’s Electoral Commission to recompile the country’s voter register for the 2016 general elections.

NPP’s demand is based on claims that the country’s voters register is over bloated with names of people from Ghana’s neighbouring countries.

Mr. Twum Boafo, however, mocked the NPP, stating that the demand is much ado about nothing.

He said Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia’s claim that there are over 70,000 Togolese on Ghana’s register was the NPP’s give-away that they were targeting to get the names of people of Voltarian extraction to be deleted from the voters register because Voltarians are stereotyped as NDC.

On the basis of the NPP’s selective targeting, he said the explanation that the names mentioned were Togolese dangled question marks on the Ghanaian nationality of Gabby Asare Otchere-Darko, a cousin of Nana Akufo-Addo, the NPP Flagbearer, who though registered in Ghana as a Ghanaian voter, also holds British Citizenship.

The Free Zones boss mocked at suggestions by some in the NPP that the country's donor partners should fund the compilation of a new register saying it would have been more sensible if such monies would have been requested for the construction of the rail line from Tema to Paga.

Reiterating prevailing sentiments about the NPP’s demand for a new voters register, Mr. Twum Boafo said the party was on that demand chorus because it fears that the current biometric machinery has deleted names of several multiple registrations in the party’s stronghold of Ashanti.

He said the NPP was hell bent on demanding a new voters register simply because the compilation process will be opportune for the party to re-inflate the register with minors and multiple registrations in the Ashanti region.