The Defence Minister has said the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) and National Democratic Congress (NDC) are guilty of busing people to voters’ registration centres in Banda.
Dominic Nitiwul made this revelation in a yet-to-be-aired interview on PM Express on Monday.
“Both parties were busing people. I am not going to sit down here and say it is only one party that was busing. They were all guilty of doing it. That is the briefing I had from the military,” he told Evans Mensah.
This comes on the back of complaints by some residents in Banda in the Bono Regions, about alleged intimidation by security officials hindering their willingness to participate in the ongoing registration process.
The latest addition to the reservations was expressed by the General Secretary of the NDC.
In a video widely shared on social media, Johnson Asiedu Nketia is seen confronting some military personnel in Banda who had mounted roadblocks to supposedly prevent the busing of people to centres.
According to him, the incident gives credence to their allegations of intimidation tactics employed by the NPP to disenfranchise Ghanaians in the opposition’s strongholds in a bid to win the 2020 general elections.
But speaking to JoyNews, the Defence Minister explained that both parties had signed an agreement with the Regional Security Council to prevent the busing of registrants to ensure sanity of the process through the deploymenty of soldiers and police.
He further said Mr Asiedu Nketiah’s reaction at the checkpoint in Banda was unfounded.
“What Asiedu Nketia did yesterday was wrong, because I saw about two or three cars behind him with people loaded. They did not even respect the Covid-19 protocols and they were apparently moving to the registration centres to register in disregard to what REGSEG said.
“Remember that the first agreement was that REGSEG must deploy security, so REGSEG actually deployed the soldiers and police to implement their orders,” he said.
The Bimbilla MP explained that the security blockades were part of the moves recommended by the Council to check the malpractice, which he admitted was being undertaken by the two major political parties.