Opinions of Monday, 18 January 2016
Columnist: Eyiah, Kobena
Kobena A Eyiah
Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! ( Isaiah 5:20 )
They have sunk deep into corruption, as in the days of Gibeah. God will remember their wickedness and punish them for their sins (Hosea 9:9 ).
Suggestions
I also used to believe in the necessity for a new voters’ register, but with the revelation that the Electoral Commission’s Information Technology Department is staffed by stark illiterates (probably part of the “project”), a new register will not be any better than the current one. Whatever the outcome of Election 2016, there will be the need for a special committee of Mathematicians and Computer scientists of the three national universities, to develop a new voters’ register for Ghana. Any attempt to use the “twenty-seven zero” type of EC graduates to create another voters’ register will only be throwing precious money that Ghana does not have, into the Atlantic Ocean!
If the Chair of the Electoral Commission is really independent as she wants the world to believe, she should stop her oral diarrhoea about irrelevancies and exhibit the register for three weeks, during which period registered voters will be identified biometrically. Any names that cannot be so verified should be expunged from the register. And let nobody give me any cock and bull stories about “people’s rights.” The law was clear as to how people were to be registered, unless the inflated acquisition of that biometric equipment was another one of those create, loot and share scams that have been the hallmark of this government.
Such an exercise will not only clean the register, it will also pave the way for “biometric identification only” verification for Election 2016!
Challenge
Failing that, I will challenge President Mahama, if he truly believes in a just Christian God as I do, to commission the Mathematics and Computer Science Departments of the Universities of Ghana, Science and Technology and Cape Coast, to clean the register within two months, which is possible, given that 16 year olds are developing and managing large volumes of data with Microsoft Access software.
With that I am serving notice that if there is no movement on the part of the EC or the president by the end of January, I shall begin to gather signatures for a class action against the Electoral Commission and its chair. The future of Ghana is too important to leave to a few individuals who don’t seem able to tell the difference between their noses and their backsides.
By the way, I will suggest that the next time it becomes necessary to appoint a new chairman for the Electoral Commission, a Mathematician, Engineer or Scientist is appointed. The social science people do not seem to have any appreciation for the importance of numbers and why even stealing should be done with some finesse. Any scientist or engineer who produces such sloppy fraud in his or her normal line of work cannot be entertained in any professional organisation, let alone being recommended for national awards!
I am not done yet.
PS: In part one, line 6 of paragraph 15, “Match” should have been “March.” The error is very much regretted.