IMANI Blows Alarm On EC Sneaking Biometric Machines To Recycling Company

Governance think tank, IMANI Africa, has blown the lid on the Electoral Commission’s clandestine movement of biometric verification equipment to a recycling company.

In a series of tweets on April 28, Franklin Cudjoe, President of the respected think tank, says IMANI’s probe shows that, the EC has been doing this behind the back of stakeholders illegally.

“Our colleague discovered that the EC had been sneaking out biometric devices that are core components of the BVMS to recycling companies without any public notice. Please read the rest of the briefing @ below and share widely. His checks showed that these actions had never come up for discussion during the Inter-Party Advisory Committee (IPAC) meetings, through which the EC engages with its political stakeholders.

“He also discovered that the EC never opened any public tenders for these sales of sensitive equipment to recyclers,” Mr Cudjoe tweeted.

But this is not the worst. According to Mr Cudjoe, the  company to which the EC, has been making the clandestine supply of the biometric equipment, does not even have the requisite legal registration and certification.

“Worst of all, he discovered through painstaking checks that the recycling companies engaged for the exercises do not have the strict certifications for secure data destruction that is required when disposing of sensitive equipment like this.”

According to him, “IMANI have since done our checks and we are shocked at the EC’s recklessness. But this is the same EC we encountered in 2020.”

This is the latest from IMANI in respect of the EC and its suspicious stories around recent revelations that some Biometric machines in its possession had gone missing.

Earlier, IMANI, had punched holes in the EC’s claims, warning that the current leadership of the electoral body cannot be trusted.

“It has become clear that the EC, in its current shape and form, is pathologically misgoverned and cannot be expected to uphold any serious public service standards. It no longer has the DNA to conform to its ethical obligations. Unless and until a total overhaul of the culture in the leadership ranks of the EC occurs, it is frankly fruitless to expect any accountability from it. But in due course, that accountability will come.

They did everything they could to twist the facts, hide information, and outrightly lie to justify their decision to jettison the existing BVMS so that they could procure a brand new one.”

Already, in response to the EC’s earlier announcement that it had auctioned 10 old biometric verification devices, IMANI has been aski ng questions, including whether the EC sought parliamentary clearance before auctioning the BVDs.

“Before the EC jettisoned the existing system, it had told Parliament that it had implemented a “2 BVDs per polling station” policy and therefore had more than 70,000 BVDs in stock. Then in 2020, it proceeded to buy a brand-new set of biometric voter registration (BVR) kits with corresponding BVD kits and swore (despite video evidence collected by Bright Simons) that they never used any of the pre-existing devices in the 2020 mass voter registration exercise. Why then did they auction only 10 out of the over 70,000 devices? Why “10”, and not 5, 100, or 1000? How have the remaining tens of thousands of devices been disposed of?

“Ghanaians who have been paying attention to the EC’s strange conduct under the current leadership know that the EC admitted to have lost some BVRs recently, but when pushed it insisted that they were only five in number. There is a clear pattern here. What exactly is going on?”

Mr Franklin Cudjoe, also raised questions about the EC’s seemingly sneaky disposition about the true number of biometric machines that have gone missing.

“How does the EC reconcile the claim of just 10 devices with the thousands of identical devices captured in the photographic evidence shared by our colleague?”