By The IMANI Center for Policy and Education has petitioned the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) to investigate the Electoral Commission’s (EC) actions regarding the retirement and disposal of certain election-related equipment.
The center has also suggested a potential referral of the matter to the Office of the Special Prosecutor (OSP) for a specialized corruption risk assessment tailored to the EC’s unique capacities.
This comes in response to the EC’s disposal and auctioning of equipment it deemed obsolete.
Franklin Cudjoe, Executive Director at IMANI, in a statement on Monday, May 6, announcing the petition filing, expressed grave concerns about the EC’s management of the nation’s limited resources in fulfilling its responsibilities.
He stated that they believed such actions amounted to “misappropriation,” “wastage,” and “misuse” of the resources in question. He added, “At a time when the nation cannot service its debts and is in the midst of a tight IMF-supervised fiscal regime, such egregious conduct cannot be tolerated.”
Mr. Cudjoe highlighted in the petition that the EC’s actions in the premature retirement and eventual disposal of tens of thousands of laptops, digital cameras, printers, scanners, and fingerprint verifiers have been driven by a conflict between its obligations under various laws to prudently allocate the country’s resources for the benefit of the citizens and its tendency to make decisions favorable to various commercial vendors and transactors.
“Furthermore, we stated our belief that the EC’s most recent conduct has been necessitated by a need to curtail transparency and accountability, and thus was motivated by a collective conflict of interest and potential corruption. By its actions, it is attempting to erase inventory records and physical evidence of the blatant falsehoods it has told over the last four years regarding the purchase history of expensive electoral equipment.”
“We asserted our longstanding claim that the EC’s electoral equipment is a portfolio of multiple items, bought and refurbished at different intervals between 2011 and 2019. That portfolio does not uniformly date to 2011 or 2012 as the EC has falsely and persistently claimed, and could thus not be so uniformly obsolete as to warrant a firesale to mysterious bidders, who have kept the prime portions for themselves and discarded the rest to be used as scrap. Ghana cannot continue to be milked in this fashion,” he further stated.
Franklin Cudjoe further noted that some of the devices cost more than $3000 each, and collectively, they are valued at tens of millions of dollars.
“At worst, they should have been donated to other government agencies that routinely buy similar machines at great cost to the state or transparently sold through a properly regulated public tender under the strict rules of the Public Procurement Act to ensure strict value for money,” he added.
Mr. Cudjoe expressed his opinion that the equipment in question contained sensitive voter information, such as polling records and biometric data. He raised concerns that such data could be reassembled by malicious actors for nefarious purposes, posing potential harm to citizens and possibly undermining Ghana’s public elections.
“We do not believe that the EC and its commercial counterparties in these transactions complied with the highest standards of data handling and protection required in the transfer and/or disposal of such sensitive equipment. At any rate, none of them had the requisite certifications to be trusted with such a task,” he added.
Below is the full statement
IMANI_CHRAJ_Petition_EC_Disposal_BVMS_Biometric_Equipment_BVRs_BVDs_May_2024-FC-2
