IMANI Africa's Founding President, Franklin Cudjoe, stated that the commission's decisions regarding the disposal of laptops, digital cameras, printers, scanners, and fingerprint verifiers appeared conflicted between its obligations to utilize national resources judiciously and its favoritism towards commercial vendors.
Cudjoe asserted that such behavior amounted to "misappropriation," "wastage," and "misuse" of resources, especially concerning the nation's fiscal constraints.
He said "Furthermore, 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."
Cudjoe further noted that certain devices were valued at over $3000 each, cumulatively amounting to tens of millions of dollars.
"At worst, they should have been donated to other government agencies that routinely buy similar machines at great cost to the state or transparently sold through a properly regulated public tender under the strict rules of the Public Procurement Act to ensure strict value for money.
"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," he stressed.