Thursday , March 28 2024

Political parties are making IPAC ineffective – PNC

Chairman of the Peoples National Convention (PNC), Bernard Mornah, is accusing representatives of the various political parties on the Inter-Party Advisory Committee (IPAC) of doing things to undermine the work of the Committee.

According to him, the omission and commission of some members serving on IPAC is making the advisory body ineffective, stressing that its credibility has always been on the line.

His argument was premised on the pronouncement by the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) that the Electoral Commission per their road map towards election 2016 has no date set aside for validation of the voters’ register.

Such was one of the main reasons the elephant family together with some other political groupings, Wednesday, April 6, 2016, embarked on a demonstration dubbed ‘Baamu Yaada’ in Kumasi in the Ashanti Region.

But Mornah commenting on the issue in an interview on Accra based Okay FM, Friday, said he was really surprised that the NPP would embark on such a demonstration against the backdrop that the electoral body had no date on its road map for the validation exercise.

“It hurts me to speak for the EC but I am sad that as political parties we go and have an understanding and some of us will turn around and bastardize the understanding that we have.

We went to IPAC meeting and the Electoral Commissioner told us that they will do the limited registration from the 28th April and then somewhere June, they will do exhibition and then the validation and exhibition will go together”.

“Some people even suggested that if nobody comes to crosscheck his or her name in the voters’ register it should be considered that the person is not alive and that that the person is not a qualified voter. So those who attended the IPAC – the NPP Acting General Secretary, John Boadu, Peter Mac Manu and O. B. Amoah, did they communicate the position that we all agreed at IPAC to their party?”

EC has responded to our appeal positively and they are doing so. If we continue doing things this way, it is an attempt to discredit the Electoral Commission and everything that they do”, he noted.

He added “from the way we are doing things we are making IPAC ineffective because when we all go and take a decision and later some of us turn around not to believe in what we have said, do you think that the Electoral Commission will be bound by the decisions or the things that we also say at IPAC?”

“If we want the EC to take the decisions we make at IPAC seriously we ourselves must also respect the agreement that we make whether those decisions are within what we thought, that is democracy”.

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