The General Secretary of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), Mr Johnson Asiedu Nketia, has stoked the controversy about the registered voters in Togo with his announcement that he will visit NDC registered members in Togo to encourage them to come and cast their vote on December 7.
He said he would be going to Togo next month to meet Ghanaians (NDC supporters), registered in Volta Region and assure them that the 1992 Constitution that guarantees Ghanaians from the Brong Ahafo and Ashanti regions who live abroad to come and register and vote, covers those in Togo.
Mr Asiedu Nketia, who was addressing a large crowd of members of the Volta Caucus at Fumso in the Adansi Asokwa Constituency in the Ashanti Region, said he would urge them to come in their numbers to cast their votes.
The Volta Caucus, which has Madam Dzifa Attivor, the former Minister of Transport, as its leader, is a group of people from the Volta Region who support the NDC but reside outside the Volta Region. Their aim is to engage in house-to-house campaign to garner votes for President John Dramani Mahama and the various parliamentary aspirants.
Adansi Asokwa and the New Edubiase Constituency are both farming communities with large numbers of settlers from the Volta and the three northern regions.
The NDC and Mr Kofi Yakah, the NDC Member of Parliament (MP) for New Edubiase, have been winning the seat and the presidential elections over the years in the constituency and it is one of the safest seats of the party in the Ashanti region.
Constitution
Mr Asiedu Nketia said the 1992 Constitution that guaranteed people from the Ashanti, Nzema and Brong to come from abroad and register and cast their votes for their preferred candidates, is the same for those Ghanaians living in Togo.
He said NDC was the only party that guaranteed the rights of minority ethnic, religious and gender groups, a move that had endeared the party to such groups who have always cast their votes for the party.
He said unlike the NDC, the NPP was against Ghanaians who lived in neighbouring countries, and that was the reason they alleged that some of the votes in Upper West and Upper East regions were from Burkina Faso, those from Brong Ahafo and Western were from Cote d’Ivoire, while those from the Volta Region were not Ghanaians but from Togo.
“Let My Vote Count” and the NPP in recent past have argued that some of the people who registered in the towns and villages bordering Cote d’Ivoire and Togo were not Ghanaians and urged the EC to expunge their names from the voters register.
The NPP brought out some of the names which they said came from Togo but the EC insisted that it could not vouch for the integrity of those documents.
Settlers
He said it was based on such erroneous impression that immediately after the 2012 election, they wanted the Supreme Court to throw away votes from those neighbouring countries, meaning, “They believe that their votes were more valuable than those from minority groups.
“When we meet you like this, it is not about tribalism. It is about fighting for our rights and fighting for what is due us, period. Our laws state that a Ghanaian can go to any part of the country. All I need to do is to have an agreement with the land owners, and this does not include how the settler would vote”, he stated.
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