The hullabaloo in Ghana right now is largely due to the missing in action of a critical state institution, the Ghana Statistical Service (GSS).
Voters register are always updated or created after a census conducted by the Ghana statistical service as was the case in previous exercises and decades. Indeed same was going to be the case until desperation misled Nana Addo to begin twisting the electoral commission to start a comedy of errors.
The desperation continues to engulf this government to retain power at all cost including the architectural plan well laid out and waiting for execution. The President in his address to the nation never mentioned Ghana Statistical Service who are also due to discharge their duties of conducting population and housing census originally scheduled for 15th March this year, but had to be rescheduled to 28th of June because of the novel coronavirus.
The President silence on this state institution clearly gives an indication that, the easing of the restrictions was done because of the election rigging agenda and not the lives of Ghanaians that really matter to him.
The country, Ghana has no reliable data now on the estimate of eligible voters due to the inability of the Statistical Service conduct the all important population and housing census as a result of the pandemic, so with what data and science is the EC relying upon to compile a new voter’s register? Things are simply not adding up!
As a President who actually needs to sway a bit of innocence of this coveted effort to be declared winner, he could not have mentioned Ghana Statistical Service which received an approval of $45million and has since disbursed $25million for the purchasing of materials and training of 75,000 enumerators and supervisors. The President chose to be silent because it is not part of the framework of the crooked and bad ways of winning the elections.
Neither the President nor his appointees and communicators have ever made any argument in the matter of the GSS, which is a very important institution to feed data about the people of this country to all government and private sector institutions who need the data for the purposes of national planning and sharing of resources. It is very glaring to many Ghanaians and international bodies of this attempt to see other institutions as being more important than others simply because it has no role to play to deliver unconstitutional and undemocratic elections results that would be declaring Nana Addo the winner of this election.
By Naaba Nakuwabug Fetse, Ashaley Botwe, Accra
