Franklin Cudjoe, the Founding President of IMANI Africa, has raised concerns about the Electoral Commission’s (EC) spending plan for this year’s elections. It has been reported that several biometric devices are currently missing. On March 19th, Dr. Cassiel Ato Forson, the Minority Leader of Parliament, stated that the EC confirmed the loss of seven BVDs which cannot be identified.
The minority leader has since called on the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) of the Ghana Police Service and other security agencies to “immediately issue a statement giving us the details of their investigations so far,” adding, “I am concerned and worried because that devices in the hands of an unknown person can compromise the future elections”. But in a statement, Franklin Cudjoe said “Parliament and the Finance Ministry should be careful with EC’s Spending Plans in 2024.
“Ghana’s Electoral Commission is at its prancing and pranking best again. Having earned the dubious accolade of ‘ Voting mafioso’ for clandestinely disenfranchising my people in Santrokofi Akpafu, Likpe and Lolobi on the eve of the last election in 2020, l was warming up to their recent calmness in accommodating sensible views of political parties on issues such as the use of indelible ink and closing polls at 5 pm instead of the jocular and amateurish contrary views they held.
“I knew something wasn’t quite right with the EC’s turnaround. It was just not in their DNA to be this graceful. “And voila- the EC surreptitiously reported to a parliamentary inquiry that it had lost some biometric voter machines that were procured by rigging procurement process, leaving the country with a needless total bill of $150m in 2020- which the IMF has now accepted contributed to our economic atrophy.”
He added “Sadly, we never heard the EC report the missing biometric voter machines to the Police until an innocuous question at a parliamentary hearing revealed this fiction yesterday. “Please, Parliament and the Finance Ministry, must ignore the EC. Claims of missing biometric voting machines is a decoy to declare the remaining machines compromised and set a procurement opportunity to waste money we don’t have on purchasing new machines.
“They did the same in 2020 by strangely discarding all biometric machines which Ghana had invested up to $60m in upgrading and successfully used to run the 2016 general elections and 2019 district elections with near-zero error rates, to purchase new overpriced biometric machines through a heavily rigged procurement process.”
By: Laud Nartey
