2020 Elections Wasn't Peaceful, Free And Fair As expected - Sammy Gyamfi

The National Communications Officer of the National Democratic Congress NDC has said the 2020 elections were not peaceful, free and fair as many have said. Although the Electoral Commission chair, Jean Mensa has described the just ended December 7, election as free and fair, Sammy Gyamfi disagrees. When we were

going into the elections as key stakeholders we thought it was going to be peaceful and fair but unfortunately that was not the case. Probing further the aftermath of election 2020 on Saturday, he also observed that some security personnel deployed to ensure that the elections were peaceful did otherwise. We all saw military men

interfering with the collation of results, seeking to swap pink sheets, seeking to change results, he said. And when people protested, they shot some of them and killed them, he added. The communications officer noted that perpetrators in the just ended elections will be encouraged to engage in impunity as exhibited in the

elections if they go punished. When you fail to punish the wrongdoers, you embolden wrongdoers to engage in wrongdoing with breeding impunity, that is what we saw between the 7th and the 10th of December when we went for this year’s elections. He said In Techiman, we had a protest after the EC did the charade they

described as collation.We thought what they had done did not constitute collation so we said, do the proper thing, let’s collate the result and declare the winner, we started protesting, nobody fired a gun and nobody also assaulted anybody. The next thing we saw was the military shooting at the people and killing three in the

process. Reports from the CID suggested that there were shooting from the people but Sammy Gyamfi said that account is untrue. At least I have seen the video footage of what happened in Techiman South, nobody in the crowd was holding a gun and nobody was firing a gun. It was rather the police and the military officers

who were firing, the video is available, he countered. He added, In Ablekuman central, no NDC supporter was holding a gun, nobody fired a gun, rather it was these National Security operatives who came to the centre, fired warning shots, asked people to leave and when the people refused, they started firing directly at people. He

recalled there was a similar incidence in Awutu Senya East, wherein the voter registration exercise, Koomson Hawa has ablated to be firing gunshots at a registration centre without our law enforcement agencies doing anything about that. Gyamfi stressed, in all these cases the NDC has been at the receiving end, we have been

the victims. So far, a total of six persons; 2 in Techiman, two in Odododiodo, one in Ablekuman and another person in Sablogu lost their lives during the elections with many others left injured. For me what happened is unacceptable and dent on our democratic gains as a country, the NDC communications office said. It will continue to remain an indelible blot on the reputation of President Nana Akufo Addo and the IGP, he concluded.