Javier Nart, head of the EU Election Observer Mission (EU EOM) for Ghana’s 2020 election
Javier Nart, head of the European Union Election Observer Mission (EU EOM) for Ghana’s 2020 elections insists that despite recording deadly incidents during and after the last general elections, the overall conduct of the process was peaceful and transparent.
He was speaking to a Joy FM reporter on Thursday in apparent response to an accusation of bias raised by the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) after the party said it strongly disagreed with major aspects of the report.
The EU had mentioned five deaths in the summary of its report even though the NDC says according to its independent records eight of its members were lost due to high-handedness by security officials deployed to oversee the election process.
“Of course there were five people that died. It is not good news at all, but when you see the general outcome of the elections, they were produced in a very very peaceful way,” the EU EOM chief stressed.
He hammered the point about vigilantes and their seeming politically anonymous nature and charged the NDC to not focus on the five deaths as a reflection of the general situation. “… when you see a general situation, to focus on this disgrace, five people killed, is not the general situation.
“That is why we stressed that the elections were reliable; were credible and proceeded in a peaceful way apart from those five disgraces and some cases of violence – but very minor ones. Ghana is very very big and millions of people, so five tragedies, it doesn’t mean the tragedy of Ghana,” he added.
On the issue of the NDC calling for an official probe, he said the EU backed that call especially because it would also help define what vigilantism is in the general electoral structure: “This is absolutely important to establish what happened,” he added.
The EU EOM report has split opinion between the ruling New Patriotic Party, NPP, and the main opposition National Democratic Congress, NDC.
The former are hailing the report as a true reflection of the events that marked the last elections whiles the latter have threatened to petition Brussels over the content of the report saying it was biased and compromised to ‘whitewash’ the image of President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.