Akufo Addo’s Confidence In EC Hypocritical - Otokunor

Deputy General Secretary for the opposition National Democratic Congress NDC, Peter Boamah Otokunor, has described President Akufo-Addo’s declaration of confidence in the integrity of the Electoral Commission as hypocritical. Speaking on radio, Mr. Otokunor said the President lacked the credibility to comment on the work of the Commission. Otokunor’s remarks come after the President said the integrity of the electoral process was clear for all to see when he submitted his nomination forms for the 2020 polls. “Not only is the

President’s comment duplicitous and hypocritical but also exposes his level of complicity in the kind of misconduct that the Electoral Commission has cooked.” Mr. Otokunor maintains that every step of the electoral process has “exposed the level of incompetence and in some cases their [the Electoral Commission’s] level of deliberate confusion of the process in favour of the NPP.” “This Electoral Commission has lost credibility. People do not have confidence in the electoral process any more. Every step of the way, it has been plagued by

irregularities,” he insisted. The NDC has complained that the Commission has connived with the Akufo-Addo administration to suppress and disenfranchise potential voters in NDC strongholds. These complaints came during the voter registration exercise, where security personnel were deployed to some districts with international borders, and the voter register exhibition process, which saw some registered voters complain about their names disappearing from the roll. Mr. Otokunor said all these complaints could be attributed

to what he called the bad leadership of the EC Chair, Jean Mensa. “This Electoral Commission has been the most recalcitrant and the most biased Electoral Commission that we have ever seen in their decision-making.” The New Patriotic Party’s NPP Deputy General Secretary, Nana Obiri Boahen, defended the EC’s conduct. For the contentions with the voter register exhibition, he said: “it was a nationwide thing and therefore there was no need for the NDC to make mountains out of that exercise.” Aside from the expected issues that would be addressed, Mr. Boahen said: “there is nothing purposefully wrong with the system.” In contrast, he said the NDC has benefited from polls, in 1992 and 2012, that was “very crooked and very fraudulent.”