EC, MEDIA BRAINSTORM ON ELECTIONS (PAGE 16, OCT 12)

FORTY-four selected media practitioners from the Brong Ahafo, Northern, Upper East and Upper West regions, have met in Sunyani, the capital of the Brong Ahafo Region, to dialogue on the 2008 December Presidential and Parliamentary elections.
The meeting was aimed at critically appraising what went on during the 2008 Elections and what could be done to improve the situation.
It was organised by the Electoral Commission (EC), with the support of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
The Deputy Chairman of the EC in-charge of Finance and Administration Mr David Kanga, who set the tone for the discussion, disclosed that, the EC had embarked on reforms based on what happened before, during and after last year’s elections.
“We want ideas about what went wrong to enable us to reform the process and deliver well for 2012 and so we want people, especially all stakeholders to be frank and bring out their patriotic feelings, guided by the constitution and the electoral laws, and better journalism practices,” he stressed.
The acting Director of Public Affairs, Mr Owusu Parry, who spoke on, Review of Media Reportage of Elections 2008, stated that the commission had no power to tell the media how to do its work but “As stakeholders striking to achieve the common goal of ensuring that our democracy thrives, we all have the responsibility of prompting each other where we believe certain things have gone the way they should not have gone”.
He pointed out that election was not just the process of casting ballot but it seemed that the press was often interested in only the major exercise, saying, “Indeed a number of events preceded the election”.
Mr Parry noted that the EC undertook the replacement of lost voter Identification (ID) cards last year which lasted for 10 days but unfortunately, there was little or no mention of that important exercise in the media.
He emphasised that, the consequence of the lack of interest in that exercise was that, a lot of people did not take advantage of the replacement exercise and thus people who had lost their voter ID cards massed up later at the registration centres to offer themselves for registration.
“We think that, that unfortunate development could have been avoided if the media had shown the level of interest they showed in the election itself. We will continue to need the media and we hope that in future they will develop interest in these activities”, he stressed.
According to the acting Public Affairs Director, during the registration, media reports of attacks’ on applicants in some parts of the country resulted in reprisals in other parts of the country, creating unnecessary tension and putting both registration personnel and applicants at risk.
He pointed out that, such reports, however good the intensions were, worked against the smoothness of the exercise to the extent that the EC had learnt useful lessons from that exercise and would do things differently in subsequent exercises.
On the exhibition of the voters register, Mr Parry noted that it was as important as the compilation of the register itself since it was an opportunity to clean the register, adding that, names of unqualified persons were removed while names of people who were qualified and had genuinely registered but their names were inadvertently omitted.
He said it was the expectation of the commission that, due to all the challenges of the registration exercise, the media would have been interested in the cleaning exercise, especially because, politicians were mentioned to be contributing to the problems during the registration exercise.
Again, he observed that, the media would have been interested in how those politicians would assist in cleaning the register but said, unfortunately, that did not happen.
The media, he said, rather turned their attention to the commission and often asked how the EC was going to get the names of unqualified people out of the register.
“This attitude of putting the searchlight on only the commission does not help in ensuring that deliberate wrong doing is stopped. The politicians will continue to do what they always do, so long as the queries will come to the commission and not themselves”, he observed.
He said the time had come for the media to direct their attention at politicians, when such issues came up and not always blame the commission for the actions of politicians.
Mr S.Y. Aidoo, the Director, Human Resource and General Services, who spoke on “Some aspects of the Law Governing Elections”, stressed that, the EC was committed to ensuring that democracy thrived in Ghana and therefore, appealed to media practitioners to also contribute their quota in the same way.
He pointed out that, it was unreasonable for someone to accuse the EC of attempting to manipulate an election in favour of one particular political party or a presidential aspirant, saying that, staff of the EC would gain nothing if one candidate or the other was voted as president.
According to Mr Aidoo, no matter who was voted for, the positions of the EC staff, including the chairman, would remain intact, and questioned whether any of the commission members or any member of staff at the commission had been asked to proceed on leave after the new government came, unlike other state institutions, adding that, “We the staff of the EC are not thieves to manipulate elections or rig them”.
The Deputy Brong Ahafo Regional Director of the EC, Mr James Arthur-Yeboah, in his welcome address, noted that, Ghanaians were proud to hear that the international community praised Ghana for its gradual move towards maturity in the organisation and conduct of democratic elections.
Presently, he said, “Our shared hope and our common desire is to see future elections in Ghana become better organised, more transparent and fairly reported on to be credible and acceptable to all Ghanaians”.