‘Let Your Yes Be Yes and No Be No’

National Democratic Congress (NDC) General Secretary Johnson Asiedu Nketia has condemned the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) for its sudden opposition to a decision to electronically transmit election results as agreed among parties.
At a press conference Wednesday, Asiedu Nketia said the ‘communiqué was signed by everybody’ after the NPP rejected the proposal claiming electronic transmission is not backed by law.
“They should let their yes be yes and their no be no”, he said accusing the NPP of either trying to mislead the public or that the opposition party “doesn’t know what it is about”.
The NPP’s 2016 Campaign Manager, Peter Mac Manu came out of an Inter-Party Advisory Committee (IPAC) meeting held on June 12, 2015 where decisions on the status of electoral reforms were discussed.
But he later demanded that one of the reforms, the Electronic Results Transmission System (ERTS) be captured by the law.
The EC has explained that results transmitted electronically remain provisional and will not replace the manual transmission catered for under the law.
The Commission also pointed out that Peter Mac Manu was “intimately” involved in the drafting of two Constitutional Instruments (C. I.91 and C.I.94) and therefore had the opportunity to push for the legalization of electronic transmission.
The governing NDC has expressed surprise at NPP’s u-turn and wondered why the party would seek to undermine a decision taken collectively.
Asiedu Nketia explained that it is not every decision of the EC that is backed by law. At the IPAC meeting where parties agreed to use electronic transmission, the parties also agreed which of the reforms will be legalised.
“When you are dealing with elections, there are some aspects that are administrative and others that are covered by subsidiary legislation…and yet there are others covered by the Constitution. It’s not everything that should be backed by law. Many of the things, like the compilation of results, are governed by rules established by the EC,” he said.
“When we arrived at this decision, we indicated which of the rules would need Constitutional amendments, which would go into subsidiary legislation and which would just go into the training of their staff and find themselves as rules,” he added.
Asiedu Nketia suggested that the NPP is misleading the Ghanaians public.
“There are some parties who feed on the ignorance of the masses and they always seek to keep the masses ignorant in order to exploit.We are not one of them”.