Apart from its dire consequences on public health, social life and the economy, the novel coronavirus poses a present impediment to Ghana’s electoral future; aside succeeding in throwing the time table of the Electoral Commission off guard and disrupting the idea of the creation of a new voters register, it has also deepened the country’s political divide.
With barely eight months to the polls, General Secretary of the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) John Boadu has said the posturing adopted by the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) towards the measures aimed at stopping the spread of the COVID-19 suggests that it does not want the 2020 general elections to be held in December.
He says the “deliberate targeting” of the Electoral Commission by the NDC in the wake of the COVID-19, ostensibly to make the elections management body unpopular is a move that exposes their fear of contesting in the elections.
“Whether we like it or not, the government must work in such a way that, the rate at which the disease is spreading would slow down, so it becomes safer for us if we want to vote in December, to enable the Electoral Commission to be able to compile a register of integrity; so this thing about putting fear in the Electoral Commission will not help the NDC.
Describing the NDC’s behavior as “simplistic and myopic in a time they are thinking about the voters register when everybody is thinking about how to defeat COVID-19”, John Boadu said, “even if we would use the old register for the elections, there are over 2 million people who just have turned 18 whose names are not in it; if they are thinking that we would vote without including these people in the register, they should forget about it”.
It may be recalled that, General Secretary of the NDC, Johnson Asiedu Nketiah said in an interview that, the announcement of a partial lockdown in Accra, Kasoa, Kumasi and Tema and the ban on public and social gatherings by the President was to allow the EC to put together its rigging machinery.
When the lockdown was lifted, the National Communications Officer of the NDC, Sammy Gyamfi also said it was meant to give the EC the space to compile a new voters’ register.
This shift in positions, John Boadu says smacks of the NDC’s fear to allow the December 7 elections to go on; “maybe their strategy is that, they don’t want us to have the elections in December; this is what they are telling the people of this country, because lifting the lockdown does not allow the Electoral Commission as we speak now to do any registration; because there is ban on public gatherings, there’s still ban on conferences, there’s still ban on political rallies, there’s still ban on funerals and also on churches and mosques”.
