Dr. Alex Segbefia is NDC’s International Relations Director
The Electoral Commission of Ghana should be split into two with each group having separate mandates.
This is a proposal by the National Democratic Congress (NDC) through its International Relations Director.
Dr. Alex Segbefia who gave details about this proposal on Joy News’ Newsfile programme said the move will ensure that each division will have independent functions; one for regulatory functions and the other for operational functions.
This, he further explained, will help sanitise the EC’s Inter-Party Advisory Committee (IPAC) which according to him has several invalid political parties frustrating the work of the valid ones.
“We take the view that the group that actually registers political parties and the group that actually supervises whether a party has enough conditions to meet the conditions for political parties and whether they should then have voting rights at a forum legally like IPAC should be totally separate from the EC.
“All the EC will do is ‘new group which are the political parties ready for election in Ghana? We’re going to print our list of political parties who are going to contest, which ones are eligible?’ And that group will tell the EC,” Dr. Segbefia said.
“The EC will have no involvement whatsoever in that process and the EC will work with what that group tells it as to how to conduct IPAC and work with IPAC. So, it’s doable, but it takes away the problem that we’re talking about,” he continued.
Lawyer Martin Kpebu who was also a panellist on the show endorsed the proposal. His reasons were that if implemented, the move will solve the current difficulty the EC has with regulating political parties and will benefit Ghana’s electoral processes and reforms subsequently as seen in other democratic countries globally.
“I support it because that’s too much. Like you’ve said if we open the Political Parties Act now, you’ll find that most of the parties don’t have regional offices even districts, all over the country they don’t have offices. They’re just Accra parties and yet they have the opportunity to go to IPAC and then distract some parties,” he said.
Meanwhile, the NDC has also proposed that parliament approves nominations of EC Chairpersons before they are appointed.
Also, that a list of all polling stations to be used for an election with their names, code numbers and locations be gazetted and published as supplements in the state newspapers not later than 30 days.
These were part of NDC’s proposal to the EC for a reformation of the Commission.