Chairperson of the Electoral Commission (EC), Madam Jean Mensa has stated that Ghana’s December 2020 election is an inspiration for the West African sub-region that brings hope and light.
According to her, even though elections help preserve the sanctity of democracy and offer an opportunity to choose leaders and unite a nation, processes that precede them sometimes prove divisive and destabilizing and threaten the very cohesion they are designed to provide.
She noted that the past few decades have provided the world with a narrative that has spoken more of the threat than the beauty of elections on the African continent.
Ghana’s 2020 election, she said, has however proven beyond doubt that elections in Africa can provide best practices even the most advanced democracies of the world can learn from.
This was contained in a speech she delivered on Wednesday at the opening ceremony of the high-level ECOWAS parliamentary seminar in Winneba.
Mrs. Jean Mensa noted that Ghana’s 2020 election was historic for the transparency, credibility, cost-effectiveness, high turnout, and peaceful conduct that characterized it.
“So orderly, so methodical, so calm were the polls on 7th December 2020 that BBC Africa could find no other way to describe our elections than ‘boring’.”
“We conducted all our electoral processes at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, without the spread of the virus and proved that elections in our sub-region can be efficiently conducted, in spite of the odds and challenges.”
“The global COVID-19 pandemic caused a major disruption to our election timetable as a result of the uncertainty because of the fact that suppliers of our electoral materials were unable to meet our procurement schedules owing to the global lockdown. As a result, it was only six months to our elections that we were able to commence our electoral processes,” she said.
She stated despite the fears and projections of a low turnout due to COVID, a new Biometric Voters Register was compiled in 38 days and successfully registering over 17 million eligible Ghanaians, exceeding an initial target of 15 million registrants.
“On voting day, we reduced the time it took a voter to vote from 10 to 12 minutes per voter to 3-5 minutes. Thanks to the robust and efficient biometric verification devices deployed.”
“So orderly and swift was our polling process that by 1pm, 70% of our polling stations had completed voting; long before the end of the polls at 5pm.”
She noted that Ghana’s EC proved electoral processes in West Africa can be transparent as all the electoral activities were conducted in the full glare of the public.
According to her, the innovation introduced by increasing polling stations and reducing the number of voters per station and also introducing regional collation centers enabled the results to be declared in record 48 hours.
The cost of the election, she said was also reduced by 41% compared to 2016 while the cost per voter was cut down from $13.00 in 2016 to US$7.70 at a time when the cost of elections is going up the world over adding, “Through this reduction in cost, we saved our government a formidable sum of US$90 million.”
Mrs. Jean Mensa lamented that though seven people lost their lives this did not occur at polling stations or arose as a result of misconduct on the part of EC staff and indicated the security agencies will soon present their findings and recommendation for future learning.
She expressed hope the collective journey of conducting democratic elections will lead to a destination where the successes, challenges and the lessons will culminate into a new determination, new institutional strength and a new story of elections on the West African sub-continent.
