Dr. Serebour Quaicoe, the Director of Electoral Services at the Electoral Commission, has insisted that the Commission did not in any way disenfranchise the people of Guan District (SALL) in the Oti region.
According to Dr. Quaicoe, the President of IMANI Africa, Franklin Cudjoe got it wrong in his allegations against the Commission for disenfranchising the people of Santrokofi, Akpafu, Lolobi and Likpe (SALL).
Residents of SALL only voted in the 2020 presidential election and did not vote in parliamentary elections. This decision was contained in a statement from the EC on December 6, 2020, the eve of the general election.
In what appears to be a media war between the Commission and IMANI, the EC rejected the allegations, indicating that Parliament has to be blamed for the lack of representation for SALL constituents.
Mr Franklin Cudjoe, in a rebuttal described EC’s response in a May 14 statement as a display of “brazen dishonesty”.
But Dr. Quaicoe speaking on TV3’s Hot Issues on Sunday, May 19, underscored that the Commission could not allow the SALL residents to engage in wrongdoing in voting for a parliamentary candidate for the Buem constituency.
This, he said, is because one Member of Parliament cannot represent two districts, stressing that the EC didn’t want to “compromise the integrity” of the 2020 elections.
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“In 2020 they couldn’t vote because a district has been created they didn’t have constituency, if you wanted them to vote then they could have voted for their mother constituency which was Buem…an MP cannot represent two districts so Buem has Jasikan as district so the Buem MP is a member of the Jasikan district and the same MP cannot be a member of Guan district because they two separate districts,” he said.
Asked whether the Guan district was operational, which didn’t allow SALL residents to vote in Buem, he retorted, “Once it has been created, it comes into effect.”
Furthermore, Dr. Quaicoe explained that “On the 9th Novemebr 2020 Parliament passed an L.I. that established Guan district, the Commission was written to on the 10th of November. The Commission started taking steps to have a C.I. for a constituency to be put in place.”
“We drafted our C.I. sent it to the Attorney-General…when we wrote to the Attorney-General, it came to our attention that Parliament is on recess, they went on recess the very day they passed the law and came back after the elections, so there was no way we could have even fulfill the 21 sitting days for the C.I. to be passed,” he added.
