By William
Yaw Owusu
Monday, November
20, 2017
Barring any hitches, the opposition National
Democratic Congress (NDC), will be commencing a nationwide registration of its
members by the end of the week.
Reports reaching DAILY GUIDE indicate that
the materials for the registration, which is to be done manually after the
party had abandoned its expensive biometric exercise, are ready.
A source said the materials are being sent to the
regions from the party’s headquarters at Adabraka, Accra, for onward distribution
to the constituencies.
The Prof. Kwesi Botchwey election
review committee had recommended the scrapping of the biometric register
because of its fraudulent nature.
Official
Admission
In mid-October, the NDC finally
admitted that its biometric register, which it spent millions of Ghana cedis to
compile, lacks integrity and credibility and therefore cannot be relied upon
for any meaningful internal elections.
They then decided to throw away the register - which was
compiled ahead of the 2016 general election – and start a new process of
registering NDC members manually.
“The biometric register was well intended but was abused by our
operatives and does not meet the standards required to make a credible one, I
learnt people have invested heavily in the data capturing book ready to do same
when registration starts once again,” National Chairman of the party, Kofi
Portuphy, had said at a news conference in Accra on October 17.
Fraudulent
Activities
He said that all those preparing to perpetrate fraud in the next
registration exercise would not succeed because the biometric exercise is no
longer to be carried out.
Mr Portuphy said the NDC is not scrapping the biometric project
indefinitely but was going to use the manual registration to form the basis for
a new biometric data compilation in the near future.
“In line with the wishes of the majority of the members of the
NDC, and in the wake of recommendations made by the election review committee,
chaired by Prof. Kwesi Botchwey, the National Executive Committee (NEC), which
is the highest decision-making body after Congress, voted unanimously for the
scrapping of the register which was used to conduct our internal elections last
year,” Mr. Portuphy confirmed.
“The register, which was meant to be a biometric one, did not
meet the standards required to make it qualified to be a biometric register.
NEC has decided that we should adopt a manual process of capturing the names of
members at the branch levels nationwide to avoid infiltration and test the real
strength of the party,” he submitted.
DAILY
GUIDE
indicated
DAILY
GUIDE had published that the NDC was throwing away the
biometric register because of the inherent fraud associated with it, but the
party’s gurus came out to deny it vehemently.
But now the chickens have come home to roost as the
reality has dawned on them.
The NDC had come out to deny contents
of Prof. Kwesi Botchwey Committee’s report as they are being serialized by DAILY
GUIDE, but it’s now turning round to implement the same recommendations
the newspaper published earlier.
According to the 13-member committee that
investigated the cause of the NDC’s massive defeat at the last general elections,
the biometric exercise, which was fraught with widespread irregularities, made
the NDC to believe that it had the numbers to retain power.
“The register gave a misleading impression of the
party’s true strength in some branches and constituencies as some of the
aspirants registered non-NDC members in their bid to win at all cost and by all
means,” Prof Kwesi Botchwey’s Committee reports.
Former President Rawlings, who is the NDC founder,
had also alluded to the fact that some NDC members fraudulently registered some
New Patriotic Party (NPP) members in order to defraud the party system.
The committee’s report said the manipulation of the
register was real and that had put the integrity of the whole exercise into
question.
“The integrity of the biometric register was
compromised and a number of the primaries flawed on account of widespread
manipulation,” the report said.
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