Flagbearer of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), John Dramani Mahama has admitted that the compilation of the new voters register by the Electoral Commission (EC) has met his expectations although resisting it initially.
The NDC had earlier vowed to ensure the registration never came on. The party petitioned the Supreme Court to address its grievances which included the non acceptance of birth certificates as proof of Ghanaian citizenship to register for the card, which the court however, overruled it.
Speaking in a Facebook Live session, former president Mahama conceded that although the NDC resisted the registration, its expectations has been met considering the number of people captured in the register.
“I think the exercise met our expectations… [Over 16 million registrants] is within the range that one would have expected,” Mahama said.
The EC had announced the total number of Ghanaians captured at the eighth edition of the ‘Let the Citizen Know’ series on Friday, August 7.
Deputy Chairman of Corporate Services at the EC, Dr Bossman Asare said, “as at 6th August 2020, the Commission had registered a total of 16,663,669 nationwide. Since the last briefing, the four top regions have maintained their positions. The Greater Accra region has especially lost some grounds in percentage terms from 21.34 % to 20.8% of the total registered. The Ashanti region also reduced marginally by 0.1% to its current 17.9%.”
John Mahama explained the NDC mounted a resistance because there was no population census which had always been the norm.
“Initially we had strong objections to compiling a new register. We believe that we could use the old register because by ages of registers it [the old register] was still relatively young and because we had not done the population census, we said that ‘why don’t we use this one and if we do the population census we will have an accurate data and then we could go ahead and do it,” he said.
Source: GhanaFeed.com
