The Vice President of IMANI Africa, Mr Kofi Bentil has chastised the current Electoral Commission Chairperson for failing to abide by the legal laws which will sustain peace in the country.
According Mr Kofi Bentil, the Electoral Commission which is being led by Madam Jean Mensah have failed to utilize the laws upon which the Commission derives its responsibility as the sole institution in-charge of orgnizing and conducting a free and fair elections.
He then added that, an institution such as the Electoral Commission should be one, that listens and takes into consideration the legitimate calls made by all the political parties involved.
“The current debate is exactly because we have an Electoral Commission which has essentially become a pernicious institution. It refuses to do what is written in the law. It arrogates to itself powers it does not have. It creates an unnecessary cost and stress on this country.
“And you have political parties like NDC and co, they won`t even respond to them. So, this debate, if you check in the past, about four election cycles, we almost every time have a strained debate about registration and we are here again. And it does not make any sense,” Mr Kofi Bentil iterated in an interview with an Accra based media house, Joy-News Tv.
Mr Kofi Bentil further details the actual responsibilities of the Electoral Commission however, he claims the EC has neglected the rules to which the institution is mandated to conduct the elections.
“The constitution says, compile and register. And in (sic) Addy, it was made sufficiently clear to the Electoral Commission that your job is to facilitate voting. Your job is not to do things to make people lose their right to vote. It is the other way.
Kofi Bentil went further to recount instances where the current leadership of the Electoral Commission had done contrary to the decisions the entire public is against.
“And you have situation where this Electoral Commission chooses not to listen to the law, not to listen to even the main parties. We have a judgement against the EC to do things it refuses to do, and then it just goes ahead and does what it wants to do.”
Plus, Kofi Bentil argued that, “when we go in, we will look at some of these details about why the EC is becoming a lawless institution and sends us around this thing every four years. God has kept this country from a civil war, the EC is tempting fate and we should score it at the point it refuses to be audited. Nobody knows the extent of its assets,” he stated.
