Atik Mohammed has rubbished IMANI's petition to the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ), urging an investigation into the Electoral Commission’s (EC) actions regarding the retirement and disposal of election-related equipment.
The move is in response to the EC’s recent disposal and auctioning of equipment it deemed obsolete.
Executive Director at IMANI, Franklin Cudjoe, in a statement on Monday, May 6, expressed deep concerns over EC's management of the country’s limited resources.
Mr. Cudjoe perceive the EC's actions as constituting “misappropriation", “wastage,” and “misuse” of resources.
"...we stated our belief that the EC’s most recent conduct has been necessitated by a need to curtail transparency and accountability, and thus was motivated by a collective conflict of interest and potential corruption. By its actions, it is attempting to erase inventory records and physical evidence of the blatant falsehoods it has told over the last four years regarding the purchase history of expensive electoral equipment.”
“We asserted our longstanding claim that the EC’s electoral equipment is a portfolio of multiple items, bought and refurbished at different intervals between 2011 and 2019. That portfolio does not uniformly date to 2011 or 2012 as the EC has falsely and persistently claimed, and could thus not be so uniformly obsolete as to warrant a firesale to mysterious bidders, who have kept the prime portions for themselves and discarded the rest to be used as scrap. Ghana cannot continue to be milked in this fashion”, parts of the IMANI statement read.
Mr. Cudjoe added; “We do not believe that the EC and its commercial counterparties in these transactions complied with the highest standards of data handling and protection required in the transfer and/or disposal of such sensitive equipment. At any rate, none of them had the requisite certifications to be trusted with such a task.”
Reacting to the issue during Peace FM's "Kokrokoo" show, Atik Mohammed likened Franklin Cudjoe and his IMANI's attitude to "unnecessary hatred" for the Electoral Commission.
He stated that IMANI is only "rehashing old failed issues" because their allegations against the EC have always turned out to be flawed.
To Atik, the current leadership of the EC has acted creditably in regard to the management of the Biometric Verification Devices (BVDs) and other devices.
To buttress his position, he detailed some figures stating how the EC in the purchase of new BVDs saved cost which, to him, must be commended.
The former PNC General Secretary noted that the Jean Mensa-led EC, unlike the previous EC under the leadership of Charlotte Osei, purchased over 74000 new BVDs at a cost of 336 dollars per machine in contrast to Charlotte Osei-led EC's proposal to buy 10000 new BVDs at 917 dollars per machine.
Atik therefore queried IMANI, asking how can the current EC action "amount to wastage" as they claim?
In his conclusion, IMANI's petition to CHRAJ will amount to nothing, saying "they (IMANI) wanted to create a certain public disaffection for the Electoral Commission and when their plot wasn't successful, now they say they are going to CHRAJ. As for CHRAJ, it's a place that everybody can go but they (IMANI) have no basis".
"Sometimes, when someone is naturally malicious, there is nothing you can do about such a person", he argued.
