The Municipal Chief Executive for Sagnarigu, Hajia Mariam Iddrisu ended the day one of her monitoring of the 18 registration centres in the Tamale North and Sagnarigu constituencies within her municipality in the ongoing mass voter registration exercise by Electoral Commission (EC), which commenced on June 30, 2020.
There are a total number of 1,944 registration centres put together in the northern region with 395 clusters.
The first phase of the exercise, according to the EC, has 202 centres in the region which is ongoing smoothly.
Hundreds of prospective voters turnout in their numbers to register in both constituencies and other areas in the northern region.
However, Hajia Mariam during the tour said the massive turnout exceeded her expectations on day one of the exercise in the two constituencies within the municipality.
The MCE noted the smooth start of the exercise was very impressive, arguing further that, “being the first day of registration one would have expected some challenges with the biometric machines and the arrangement pertaining to the start of the process”.
Social distancing violated
The Sagnarigu Chief Executive however observed some teething challenges at the registration centres with regard to the COVID-19 safety protocols.
Hajia Mariam conceded that the registrants failed to adhere to the social distancing directive because they didn’t understand why they should distance themselves in the queues.
The argument of these applicants in an interaction with the MCE was that, people will infiltrate the queues when they space up and therefore their difficulty in observing the guidelines.
Apart from this, there was also inadequate supply of Veronica Buckets at some of the registration points and others were faulty.
However, the Sagnarigu Municipal Assembly provided some hand washing equipment with the intervention of the MCE.
She encouraged the people to massively register once the EC officials are deployed to their communities, stating that, “Let’s take advantage of the proximity to our places of abode to register in order to exercise our franchise come December 7, 2020. Without a voter registration ID card, you cannot exercise your franchise, you can’t give Nana Addo four more years to do more”.
