Tension and violence associated with registration exercise and elections have not reduced - CDD-Ghana

Senior Program Officer at the Ghana Centre for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana), Mr Mensah Aborampah has indicated that tension and violence associated voter registration will never decline depending on the trend analysis done by CDD-Ghana and the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre (KAIPTC).

Looking at the data from the trend analysis, Mr Mensah Aborampah recounted on UTV’s 'Critical Issues' programme hosted by Afua Pokua, popularly known as Vim Lady that tension and violence have always been on the rise from 2008 to 2016.

“If you look at the trend analysis of the voter registration exercise, since CDD and Kofi Annan jointly monitored the exercise, the tension and violence associated with it have never declined; they are always on the rise. The trend analysis from 2008 to 2016, the violence associated with the registration has never dropped and I don’t believe that the violence associated with the registration exercise can ever decline as the trend analysis does not show that it will go down."

He added that the measures put in place for the registration exercise to be peaceful are not being forced, thus, the only surest way to have a peaceful electoral process is to work with the measures that have been put in place.

Mr Mensah Aborampah, however, blamed every tension which has arisen out of voter registration on the two main political parties, the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the largest opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC).

He insisted that violence associated with voter registration exercise can never go down as long as there is no purposive attempt to work with the measures which have been put in place to end the tension which arises after the election.

“In every tension-related situation, there is likely to be violence and so it cannot decline as long as we have not made any purposive attempt to work with measures we have put in place to stop the tension,” he emphasized.

He again mentioned that data available to CDD-Ghana indicates that the number of vigilante groups that perpetuate violence at every registration exercise is on the rise as the number has moved from 12 vigilante groups in 2008 to 27 vigilante groups in 2016 as reported in Act 999.

“In 2008, we monitored 12 vigilante groups and in 2012, the data that Dr Kwesi Aning brought was about 21 and right now we have about 27 vigilante groups in the country. If you look at Act 999 in 2016, the number of recognised vigilante groups was 27 and there are those we have not captured in our data. If we monitored 21 vigilante groups in 2012 and 27 vigilante groups in 2016 according to Act 999, then it means the number of vigilante groups is on the rise,” he disclosed.

“I am summarising to show that tension associated with election is on the rise and so violence in election is rising and the vigilante groups used to commit the violence is also increasing, and so it will be difficult to say that violence in election has reduced,” he insisted.