EC MUST BE BOLD TO ASK FOR FUNDS IF... - TUC (P.15) 24-09-08

Story: Kofi Yeboah

Organised labour has called on the Electoral Commission (EC) to be bold to ask the government for more funds if it needs additional resources to perform its duties efficiently.
It said the EC could not proclaim that it had been given all it needed and yet not have adequate logistics to carry out its functions when expected to do so.
The Secretary-General of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), Mr Kofi Asamoah, said this at a news conference in Accra on Monday. The news conference followed a careful observation of the political atmosphere by the TUC — the biggest civil society and most representative labour organisation in the country — particularly in relation to pertinent issues raised at its recent Quadrennial Delegates Congress in Kumasi.
He also asked the EC to take urgent and necessary steps to clean the voters register before December to assure Ghanaians of free and fair elections.
He challenged the EC to, as a matter of national emergency, come clean of its preparedness in the run-up to the December polls to ensure credible, free and fair elections that would guarantee peace in the country.
“In this age of Information and Communications Technology (ICT), it should be possible for the EC to seek expert advice to assist it in carrying out the essential task of cleaning the voters register. This, we suggest, should be done without delay,” he said.
At that meeting, the TUC called on the government, political parties, the EC and other political actors to exhibit political soberness, maturity, fairness and transparency in the electoral process, while demanding of the competing political parties and candidates serious debate on critical issues of national development, instead of the politics of insult and personality attacks.
“Unfortunately, we cannot say that the political situation and the electoral process measure up anywhere near these standards,” the TUC observed, adding that since coming events cast their shadows, it was obliged to raise the alarm bell on the danger ahead, instead of waiting for the situation to degenerate.
The TUC cited the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) and the largest opposition party, the National Democratic Congress (NDC), as the key political parties that were behind the violence, while picking on the security agencies for their lapses in dealing effectively with the flash points.
Addressing his maiden news conference after his election as the chief TUC scribe a month ago, Mr Asamoah said the TUC expected that after the rather poor organisation of the recent limited voters registration exercise, the EC would have learnt its lessons and ensured that the supplementary exercise of taking photographs and providing ID cards for those left out in the original exercise would be efficient, but there were similar problems like the shortage of films and other materials.
“All these tend to suggest that there is a serious deficit of proper planning and execution by the EC,” he said.
Mr Asamoah observed that the recent flashes of violence leading to the destruction of life and property that had characterised the campaigning, especially by the NPP and the NDC, tended to cast a dark shadow over the December elections.
He, therefore, demanded total commitment from the political parties, the security agencies, the judiciary and the general public to ensure peaceful elections in December.
Mr Asamoah called on the Attorney-General’s Department to act swiftly in prosecuting cases emanating from political, ethnic and chieftaincy violence “so that all will know that there is a real price to pay for such misconduct”.
He urged political parties not only to pontificate on peace and condemn acts of violence by their opponents only but also be bold enough to publicly condemn their members who engaged in such acts and ostracise those persons.
Mr Asamoah urged the media to put the political actors on their toes and make them respond to tough questions about the deteriorating situation so that those who had no credible answers to the challenges ahead could quietly resign.