Political Parties Outside Parliament (PPOP), a coalition of parties without representation in the legislature, has called on the government to release funds to the National Identification Authority (NIA) to enable it deliver on its mandate of ensuring that all qualified Ghanaians have the National Identification Card also known as the Ghana Card.
This, they said, would help facilitate using the Ghana Card as the sole document for identification for the continuous voters’ registration in the country.
PPOP
The parties made the call at a press conference held in Accra yesterday to state their position on the proposed Constitutional Instrument (C.I.) of the Electoral Commission (EC) seeking to make the Ghana Card the sole document for continuous voter registration.
The political parties that make up the PPOP are the Liberal Party of Ghana (LPG), Great Consolidated Popular Party (GCPP), National Democratic Party (NDP), People’s National Convention (PNC) and the All People’s Congress (APC).
The General Secretary of the GCPP, Citizen Ato Dadzie, who read the statement on behalf of the parties, also called on Parliament to ensure that the new C.I. was laid to help guarantee the integrity and credibility of the voters’ register and reduce the chaos at registration centres.
He said the new C.I. that seeks to make the Ghana Card the sole form of identification for prospective voters would help cure the issue of foreigners and minors getting onto the electoral roll.
“A country cannot be truly democratic until its citizens, not foreigners, have the opportunity to choose their representatives through elections that are free and fair,” he stated.
“In every election, modalities are set out to ensure a level playing field and also set the tone for credible and transparent processes that will end in an acceptable result by stakeholders. This we do even in our internal political party elections,” Mr Dadzie stated.
Consensus building
Mr Dadzie said discussions for a new C.I. to make the Ghana Card the sole document for identification for voter registration started about two years ago in October 2021, involving all stakeholders made up of political parties and civil society organisations.
He said it was resolved after almost a year of deliberations and series of meetings to accept to use the Ghana Card as evidence of identification for anyone who applies for registration as a voter.
He therefore described, as untrue statements made in a press conference by the Minority Caucus in Parliament to the effect that the National Democratic Congress (NDC) was not invited to the series of meetings to discuss the proposed C.I.
Mr Dadzie, therefore, dared the NDC to tell Ghanaians how the use of the Ghana Card as a source document to register as a new voter could be rigging machinery, saying the same EC the party was discrediting conducted the recently ended elections of their national officers and would also conduct and supervise their election of presidential and parliamentary candidates.
“Ghana has come a long way with her democracy and has attained enviable achievements in the sub-region and across the globe. We should, therefore, not allow baseless suspicions to ruin the successes we have chalked over the years,” he said.