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| Gabby Asare Okyere Darko is the former editor of the Statesman newspaper |
The current voters’ register is bogus. The only groups of people interested in maintaining it are those who are determined to use it to steal the 2016 elections. For a nation where a margin of 40,000 votes can determine who becomes President, allowing even 40,000 people who are not entitled to vote to register as voters presents a substantial defect that must be cured. This is not an ethnocentric matter. It is a nationalist matter. No true Ghanaian would want other nationals with no allegiance to our country to determine our destiny for us.
From all indications, Ghanaians are readying for another shift in power in 2016. That change in 2016 calls for a change for a credible voters’ register. Those who seek to deny you that right to boot out a failed government are those who are standing in the way of changing the voters’ register. They want to steal your right to choose who leads you from you. It is that simple.
They do not intend to relent. They mean to fight it. They have the money and the people to fight to keep this bogus register. But, you outnumber them. The good people of Ghana outnumber the bad ones. Ghanaians must stand up and fight back. We must fight this legitimate battle and win or risk having foreigners deciding who should lead us. Mind you, a president who believes foreign nationals can elect him can be forgiven for ignoring his own people once elected. Getting a new, credible register is about you. It is about your right to a better government. It is about your right to brighter opportunities in life. It is about your right to choose.
Supreme Court
Is it not strange that nearly one year after the Supreme Court ruled against the use of the National Health Insurance Card for the purposes of registering Ghanaian citizens to vote, the Electoral Commission has taken no steps to offer Ghanaians who registered with their NHIS cards another opportunity to register lawfully?
The EC appears to be operating under the false assumption that the ruling is only entirely prospective and does not apply to people who registered in 2012, before the ruling. My understanding of the law is that the principle of non-retroactivity does not operate to prevent the correction of a past procedure to the extent that it affects substantially a prospective act and the curing of such a faulty past procedure or act does not affect the legal status of any person. Asking Ghanaians to register again does not take away their right to vote in future elections. It rather regularizes that right in a way that does not dilute the principle of one Ghanaian one vote, with one foreigner one vote, too.
Joseph Raz says that the first principle of the rule of law is that “All laws should be prospective, open and clear” (‘The Rule of Law and its Virtue’ (1977) 93 LQR 195 at 198). Thus, those who registered in 2012 with their NHIS cards could not have been guided by a law which did not exist at the time of registration. Yet, registration is merely a means to voting. The actual constitutional duty or right is voting. So the principle of non-retroactivity means that those who used their NHIS cards to acquire a voter’s ID card to vote in 2012 voted legally and their 2012 votes have not been affected by the 2014 Supreme Court decision. That stays.
The ex post facto decision by the Court only affects the procedure leading to voting in future. When the Ghana Government says that henceforth a new biometric passport is in place that does not take the right to travel abroad away from Ghanaians holding a passport which is no longer valid. It means you must trade in your old passport for a new one. There are no strict rules to the principle of legality in ex post facto law, where crime is not in issue.
Should those who used NHIS cards in 2012 be allowed to use the same voter ID, which they got by what has been subsequently ruled to be unconstitutional, to perform a prospective act of voting in future elections? No! Should they be allowed to use that same card when that substantial procedural defect (of using NHIS cards) can be cured by simply giving them another opportunity to register again by bringing another identification document? Absolutely no! Should the slight inconvenience involved in re-registration be weighted over and above the international offence of allowing non-nationals to determine the destiny of our sovereign nation?
The need for the EC to purge the register of that defect has been brought home to us by the news that at least 76,286 Togolese nationals managed to register in Ghana in 2012 in about six or so border constituencies alone. Let us look at this matter as a nationalist matter and not a tribal kind. It should not be conceived that Ghanaians of any region would want foreign nationals, with no right to vote, to help them elect their parliamentarians for them. That is an insult we should not countenance. I am prepared to wear my nationalist cap proudly on this matter.
Odododiodio
Ironically, during the 2012 biometric voter registration exercise, the NDC Parliamentary Candidate for Odododiodio, Nii Lantey Vanderpuye, organized thugs to prevent Ghanaians (mainly Akans), recognized, at least, as permanent traders/workers in the constituency from registering. He cited lack of evidence of residency requirement. His view was that they were not “ordinary residents” per his own Bukom ‘constitutional’ interpretation of the electoral law. It was this provocative action that triggered that controversial conditional statement from Kennedy Agyepong, MP. Today, those who defended that discriminatory act by the NDC Deputy Minister of State in Odododiodio have now changed their tone.
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| Nii Lante Vandapuye is the NDC MP for Odododiodioo constituency |
The NPP has compared the electoral roll of Ghana and her neighbouring country Togo and found, after 10% of that exercise, that over 76,000 people have registered to vote in both countries. We should not concern ourselves with what the laws of Togo say about those entitled to vote there. What we should concern ourselves with is who is entitled to vote in Ghana. Here the law is straightforward. You have to be Ghanaian and 18 years or above.
In other countries, like the UK, you are allowed to register at the age of 16 to vote when 18, and you need not even be a citizen but a permanent resident in order to register to vote and if you are a citizen abroad there are facilities to exercise your franchise at the embassy or to post your vote. EU citizens are allowed to vote in certain elections in the UK. All we have to do here in Ghana is to apply the law. That’s all!
The whole debate about dual citizenship is a clever diversion for those pushing it. Our laws don’t care even if you are a citizen of ninety-nine other countries. All we care about is that you are a citizen of Ghana and 18 or above.
But, it does not stop there. Take the case of getting a Ghanaian passport, for instance. Every Ghanaian is entitled to a Ghanaian passport. But, before you are issued a Ghanaian passport (or ECOWAS passport issued by Ghana) you, the applicant, must first show proof of your nationality. You can’t simply get to the border of Togo and expect to be allowed to cross the border because you are Ghanaian by right. To cross, you need a passport and to have a passport you need to satisfy the Director of Passport of your Ghanaian nationality.
It is the same with voting in public elections in Ghana. Yes, whether you hold a dual or multiple citizenship of Ghana and elsewhere or not the law says you must satisfy the requirement like any other Ghanaian national before you can register to vote.
Asare v A-G
In Asare v A-G (2012) the Supreme Court held, “dual nationals are citizens by operation of the Constitution and do not need any mandatory documents before exercising their rights of citizenship, in the same way as sole citizens do not need any mandatory documents before exercising their rights as citizens.” In other words, in the same way that sole nationals of Ghana are required to show proof of nationality before registering to vote, dual nationals must also satisfy the registration officer from the EC that they are Ghanaians. Whether you are Ghanaian by birth, Ghanaian with dual nationality or Ghanaian by naturalization you are required to show proof before you can register to vote in public elections in Ghana. That is all that matters.
The presumption of regularity makes it tempting to suggest that all those Togolese nationals who registered to vote in 2012 satisfied this requirement. But, that is where the presumption becomes tricky and for two main reasons. One, the practice of political operatives going to Togo to recruit Togolese to register in Ghana for the purposes of voting illegally has been known for years. It was for this reason that the late Togolese leader, Gnassingbe Eyadema, took that drastic measure to close Togo’s western borders to Ghana on December 7, 2000, so that the next Ghanaian leader could as much as possible be elected by Ghanaians and Ghanaians only. The result was that historic victory for the opposition New Patriotic Party.
Though, the annual average intercensal growth rate is 2.5% in Ghana, four years after the 2000 race, Ghana managed to compile a new, cleaner register, which is on record as the smallest since 1992 in terms of the percentage of the population captured as eligible to vote: around 50%. The 2004 voters’ register compiled by the Electoral Commission saw a reduction of the population of registered voters from 10,698,652 in 2000 (out of an estimated total population of 18,912,079) to 10,354,970 (from an increased total population of 20,063,214). In 2000, Ketu South, for example, had 86,170 registered voters. After the 2004 registration, the number of voters in the constituency reduced to 81,186. This was before it shot up to 98,282 in 2008 and up another 30% to 126,659 in 2012 to become the most populated constituency in Ghana. Work it out for yourself. You may find examples of this abnormality in other constituencies, but the more you bring out the more you strengthen the case for a new register. Tricky, as Fiifi Kwettey discovered.
Shameful NHIA
The second reason why the high number of Togolese on our register should not be treated lightly is the curious decision by the EC to add the National Health Insurance Card as one of the identification documents a voter needed to establish his or her eligibility as a Ghanaian national in order to register to vote. The National Health Insurance Authority cannot deny being an active player in that shameful illegal scheme to register non-nationals to vote in 2012. This was because, around the same time in 2010/2011, the NHIA had deliberately and oddly introduced a policy that even an international tourist on a day trip to Ghana can register for a NHIS card to access Ghana’s health service and went to the border towns to actively register people. I mean, which country will so generously give every foreigner (including residents of neighbouring countries) effective free access to its national health service?
2 million foreigners
The use of NHIS cards to register to vote made it simple for any of the two million foreigners the 2010 census captured as foreigners living in Ghana to get on the electoral list. They could not be challenged at the registration centre because they had an ID card which the EC had endorsed as a legitimate document for proving that the applicant was a citizen of Ghana. Such non-nationals are scattered across Ghana and across several constituency registers. One, therefore, cannot look at the incident of Togolese registering in Ghana in isolation from how foreigners, who are not even residents of Ghana, are actively allowed by a policy of the NHIA to acquire an NHIS card.
What also became curious was the pattern of free ‘special registration’ undertaken by the NHIA leading up to the 2012 voter registration. Out of the 905,940 people given free NHIS cards at the time, 44.5% were found in the bordering regions of Brong Ahafo and Volta. BA captured 182,849 and Volta 220,452. Yet, BA and Volta, per the 2010 census, make up only 9.4% and 8.6%, respectively, of the population of Ghana.
On the other hand, the NHIA was only able to find 20,032 poor people deserving free special registration in the Ashanti Region, the most populated region in Ghana, with 19.4% of the population. This is 2.2% of those given free NHIS cards in the two special registrations before 2012. In Greater Accra, with 16.3% of the population, 220,452 (17.3%) NHIS cards were issued in that exercise. In the third and fourth most populous regions, Eastern (10.7% of the population) and Northern (10.1) only 57,899 (6.4%) and 16,024 (1.8%), respectively, were found worthy of free NHIS cards for free access to health.
In the 2014 Abu Ramadan v EC case, the Supreme Court was minded by these happenings when it ruled that it was unconstitutional to use the NHIS card to establish nationality before registering to vote. The EC must be able to tell us how many people registered in 2012 using NHIS cards. The EC can even go further to tell us what these Togolese nationals on our register used to register in Ghana to vote.
The reality was that once you were able to get, say, 80,000 Togolese to register as voters in Ghana using NHIS cards, they were free to walk across to Ghana on election day to vote or merely having their names on the register offered a good margin of names for the inflation of votes for a particular candidate(s) in certain areas with the connivance of bent EC officers.
The case for a new register is made. What we must focus on now is how to pay for it and how to do it well and cost-effectively. That subject will be treated in a subsequent article.
The author is a political risk analyst and one of the key advocates for biometric registration in 2012.
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Source: The Statesman
