General Secretary of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), Johnson Asiedu Nketia, has chastised Council of State member, Lawyer Sam Okudzeto over his call on the Electoral Commission (EC) to start the voters’ registration exercise in places not under the partial lockdown.
The NDC scribe said as a member of the Council, the former lawmaker is supposed to advise the President on important issues that would bring development to the nation and not to ill-advise state institutions.
The EC suspended its planned compilation of a new voters’ register over the ban on public gatherings imposed on Ghanaians by President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo as part of efforts to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus disease in the country.
The exercise was scheduled to have begun on Saturday, April 18, but no new date has been announced following the suspension.
The EC says it wants to use the yet-to-be compiled voters’ register for the 2020 election on December 7, 2020.
Mr Okudzeto in an interview said “our [Ghana] case of the coronavirus is not as dramatic as it is in many countries which means that we only have few pockets in the two big municipalities and few of the smaller ones. So since the lockdown is not the whole of Ghana, the EC should start the registration in areas where there is no lockdown.”
Reacting to the comment by the Council of State member on the compilation of the voters register in the midst of COVID-19, the NDC General Secretary said in Twi: “The President has given the lockdown directives but his appointees on the ground are doing contrary because if a Council of State member says the EC should compile the voters’ register, then we have a problem in this country.
“We [Ghanaians] were expecting directives on the fight against the disease from [the Council of State] but have you heard from [the members]? While the President says we should halt and discourage public gathering, a senior member of Council of State is saying the opposite,” the NDC General Secretary added on Onua FM‘s ‘Yen Sempa’ on Thursday.
Mr Nketia said: “it’s not the will of the government to fight the disease. The fight against the illness is faulty because how can you say we should compile register at this time of the year?”