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The Danquah Institute (DI), a political think tank and policy analysts has held a press conference to highlight the growing concerns about the seemingly lackadaisical and recalcitrant posturing of the Electoral Commission (EC) ahead of this year’s general elections on the proposed November 7th date.

Addressing the Media yesterday in Accra, the Executive Director of the DI, Nana Attobrah Quaicoe enumerated several reasons for their position on the EC as lackadaisical and recalcitrant with particular reference to what they referred to as the EC’s disobedience and insubordination to a clear and express order of the Supreme Court asking the EC to take immediate and necessary steps to rid the voters’ register of both dead and registrants with National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) cards.

Nana Attobrah noted that, it is important to recognize that going by the proposed November 7 date, there is just five months to vote and the law imposes a mandatory freeze on any modification of the active register for this year’s elections, 60 days (or two months) before voting which means, the entire process of deletion and re-registration of millions of names must be completed before September 7, if the November 7 date should stand.

He said, nearly one month after the Supreme Court ordered the EC to effect the deletion, the latter has decided to go by its own understanding and interpretation of the court order.

Nana Attobrah recounted that after the ruling, it took the EC two whole weeks to study the judgment and come out publicly to announce on Thursday, May 19 that the Court did not order it to delete the names of NHIS registrants.

However, a week later, on Thursday, May 26, a member of the Supreme Court panel, Justice Jones Dotse set the records straight when pointed out that, “the Supreme Court was quite forthright and clear that the use of the NHIS cards is unconstitutional. The criteria for the NHIS cards were not based on Ghanaian citizenship but only on residents in Ghana. So, any foreigner who is resident in Ghana for six months and more can register under the NHIS card. That was the basis upon which we base our decision in 2014. And in the recent one, we said the use of the NHIS is, therefore, unconstitutional. [The EC] should take the opportunity to clean the register of those undesirable persons. We also did not want to disenfranchise anybody so the Supreme Court went on to say that anybody who will be affected by that exercise must be given the opportunity to register, according to the law and constitution.”

He noted that 26 days have gone by already without the EC manifestly taking any steps to comply with the decision of the Court which practically leaves the EC barely 158 days to hold the general elections.

The Executive Director of the DI indicated that in as much as the country appears to be desirous of and impatient for change, the Minority Caucus in Parliament should not allow the EC to impose a November 7, 2016 date on us if it cannot convince the country that it has taken the necessary, legitimate, logical, efficient and impartial steps to give Ghanaians a clean register as ordered by the apex court of the land.

Again, he said, what this could effectively mean is that once the constitutional amendment is passed and the EC gets its way, the Commission is likely to hide behind it to frustrate an efficient process of deletion and re-registration as ordered by the Court and this should not be allowed to happen.

The DI opined that “With this terrible scenario of deliberate non-compliance in mind, the Danquah Institute recommends the following:

(1) The EC must within the shortest possible time, tell Ghanaians both the process and timetable it intends to follow in order to comply fully with the orders of the Supreme Court. This must be done and the process towards it started way before the constitutional amendment bill is laid before Parliament for first reading on June 20 or June 21.

(2)The EC must lay before the House for the mandatory 21 days a Constitutional Instrument (CI) to give clear legal backing to both the process of deletion and re-registration of NHIS card registrants as ordered by the Supreme Court.

(3)This must be done and the CI matured before the constitutional amendment bill comes to the House for its second reading, which is likely to take place in the first or second week of July.”

Nana Attobrah indicated that the DI will hold other news conferences soon to share with the general public the options available to the EC, which the Commission itself is fully aware of but “curiously reluctant to implement.”

“In the meantime we hope that the Commission will deem it necessary to respond and positively so to the issues we have raised and the recommendations we have proposed”, he urged