IMANI petitions CHRAJ to investigate EC over premature retirement, disposal of laptops, fingerprint verifiers

IMANI has petitioned the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice to investigate the Electoral Commission of Ghana for constitutional, statutory, and administrative breaches in respect of its conduct in the infamous “firesale of electoral equipment for scrap” scandal.

In a statement confirming the move, IMANI founder Franklin Cudjoe said the think tank is concerned by the EC’s handling of the nation’s scarce resources in the discharge of its duties.

He said IMANI believes the conduct of the EC amounts to “misappropriation”, “wastage”, and “misuse” of said resources.

Mr. Cudjoe in a statement on Facebook said “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.”

In its petition to CHARJ, IMANI lamented that the EC’s conduct in the premature retirement and eventual disposal of tens of thousands of laptops, digital cameras, printers, scanners, and fingerprint verifiers, has been motivated by a conflict between its duties under various laws to judiciously apply the resources of this country for the good of the citizenry, on the one hand, and its tendency to take decisions favourable to various commercial vendors and transactors, on the other hand.

It said IMANI believes 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.

The think tank said the 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, stressing that Ghana cannot continue to be milked in this fashion.

IMANI in its petition further stressed that it does 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.

It thus wants CHRAJ to investigate the Electoral Commission in the interest of the public.

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