Bawumia accuses EC of disenfranchising students

Europa

May 4, 2016 7:04 PM

The vice presidential candidate of the New Patriotic Party made these comments to Pulse Ghana while speaking at the University of Ghana campus during a visit to students during the registration process.

Bawumia accuses EC of disenfranchising students

Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia has accused the Electoral Commission (EC) of disenfranchising students in the

Adding his voice to a similar concerns raised by the University Students Association of Ghana (USAG), Bawumia noted that during the 5-day process on campus, EC officials had been able to register about 400 students. This number according to him was very minuscule as compared to a “conservative number of about 8000 registrable students”.

“The first five days have registered about 400 people. There are about 8000 potential people to be registered.

“Some students are staying all day in the queue and sometimes not even getting to register at the end of the day”, he continued.

The vice presidential candidate blamed the “practical disenfranchisement” of the students on the EC not providing enough registration centers to serve the Legon campus of the University of Ghana.

“This cannot be news to the EC, they should know this, they should have an idea how many potential registrable students there are on campus and plan appropriately for it”.

Bawumia said he wanted to believe that this disenfranchisement was not a deliberate act, but said, it was “unbelievable” the EC had just once centre on campus.

“If you say you’re not doing it intentionally, practically you’re doing so. We need to bring in adequate registration centers to cater for the population of the campuses.”

Bawumia exhorted the EC to “do the right thing” and bring in more registration centers to the Legon Campus and other places where the “go-slow was being experienced”.

Similar concerns were raised by Henry Nkosuo, the national president of USAG, who said it was “sick on the part of the EC” to allocate a single registration center to the Legon campus of the University of Ghana.

He highlighted that for a campus with over 28, 000 students, a single registration center was greatly inadequate. According to him, an institution like UG should have about 5 registration centres.

Nkosuo also alleged that this was a deliberate attempt by the EC to limit the number of students who would be involved in the electioneering process come November.

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