Founding President of IMANI-Africa Franklin Cudjoe says it is wrong for anybody to think that final year senior high school students will vote for one particular party in the December 7 elections. He said the notion that these students are ‘Akufo-Addo’ graduates could be misleading. Speaking on The Key Points on TV3/3FM on Saturday, July 11, Mr Cudjoe said the decision to have taken the voter registration to senior high schools was not pragmatic on the part of the election-management body of the country. Barely 10 days into the new voter registration, the Electoral Commission, Ghana (EC) decided to set up their biometric voter registration (BVR) machines in all senior high schools across the country to afford eligible students the opportunity to register for the upcoming elections. The exercise, according to the EC, was scheduled to be held on Friday, July 10 and Saturday, July 11. But this did not go down well with the National Democratic Congress (NDC) which sued the Commission and sought injunction against the exercise.
It is also seeking from an Accra High Court to expunge from the register names of all those registered by this directive. According to the NDC, the centres to be mounted in schools have not been gazetted as polling stations. Those who side with the NDC think the move by the EC is part of a grand scheme to court affection for the New Patriotic Party (NPP) government as the final-year SHS students constitute the first batch of beneficiaries of the flagship Free SHS Policy of the Akufo-Addo-led government. In his May 31 update to the nation on his government’s fight against the coronavirus pandemic, President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo called these students “Akufo-Addo” graduates. But Mr Cudjoe warned: “Not all these students will vote in a particular way.” He added: “It is not as if these students are necessarily Akufo-Addo’s graduates as has been suggested.” The IMANI-Africa chief said the EC should have properly engaged all the parties to reach a consensus before going ahead with the move. “I think they would have been more pragmatic if they had engaged the NDC and indeed all the other parties prior to this confusion.” By Emmanuel Kwame Amoh|3news.com|Ghana Follow @kwame_amoh]]>
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