NDC Brands EC Boss Incompetent, Serial Under-Achiever 

The opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) is flagging Chairperson of the Electoral Commission, Jean Mensah, as an incompetent leader who has been underwhelming at every single task that she has supervised since her appointment. At a press conference yesterday, to raise issues with the ongoing Voter Register exhibition exercise, Director of Elections, Elvis Afriyie Ankrah, enumerated what he said was the streak of failings of Charlotte Osei’s successor. “…your first assignment, registration for the regions, fiasco, 47%, limited registration, fiasco, exhibition, fiasco, which corporate governance, is it an NGO?” an unhappy Afriyie Ankrah said. His response was in Mrs. Jean Mensah’s complaint during a meeting with President Akufo-Addo, that the EC is lacking a Corporate Governance tradition and this is impacting negatively on its professional performance. But the NDC’ Director of Election pointed out that even without the Corporate Governance tradition that she was complaining about, her predecessors gave sterling performances at the helm of the Electoral Commission. “If she says in the past there were not proper corporate governance systems and we were able to get successful results, both parties alternating power with an improved system, and  your first assignment, registration for the regions, fiasco, 47%, limited registration, fiasco, exhibition, fiasco, which corporate governance, is it an NGO?” The press conference had been called by the NDC to flag the ongoing voter exhibition exercise. Among others, he said, that names of voters have somehow been mixed up, while code of polling stations have been interchanged among other strange and petty blunders. According to him, the ensuing mess is a result of Jean Mensah’s bossy attitude which has cut out the political parties from processes leading up to the exhibition.“Reports from Kpong Katamanso, for instance, indicates, that most of the old and newly registered voters cannot find their names when they visited the centres they have been voting from in the past. Every station has a code so the code will give you access, and that access then determines whether you can make any changes or amendments. Now they have mixed it up so for Kpong, their code has been changed to Ablekuma so they cannot make the changes in Kpong “Any printing of ballot papers or any material that is going out, the political parties are involved. And we send people right from day 1 and check the entire process so that nothing funny happens. How come that in this particular process they gave it to an outside agency, they did not inform the political parties, the political parties were not involved in monitoring and that is why we are having these delays,” he said. According to the NDC, the ongoing Voter Register exhibition are clumsy and deeply flawed with irregularities that infringe on the Constitutional Instrument enabling the exercise. According to him, the current mess follows a trend of failures by the EC boss who also superintended on the controversial Ayawaso West Wuogon by-election, and the referendums for the creation of new regions.