NDC calls for retooling of EC

THE National Democratic Congress (NDC) has called for a management information system audit of the information technology section of the Electoral Commission (EC).
The audit, the party said, must be geared towards reviewing the EC’s processes and human resource and information technology equipment and programmes, as well as determining the technical and human resource needs of the commission.
Mr Johnson Asiedu Nketiah, the General Secretary of the NDC, who made the call at a press conference in Accra yesterday, said the findings of the committee vindicated the NDC’s concern about the bloated figures it received from the EC, and the issue that the EC was being underfunded by the government.
The press conference was to react to the findings of a committee set up by the EC to investigate the discrepancies in voter registration figures in the Ashanti Region following allegations in that regard by the NDC.
Last Tuesday, the Chairman of the EC, Dr Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, said the figures, which formed the basis of the allegation of a bloated register by the NDC, did not exist, either on the EC compact version of the voters register or the CD-ROMs given to the NDC.
He said rather they existed on the hard copies of the voter statistics that the NDC received and were traceable to an operational error in the generation of the statistics.
Mr Nketiah said the information technology equipment, as well as the programmes, which were purchased in the early 1990s for the EC, had not seen any improvement and that was in contravention of normal information technology procedure where at least, equipment of such nature and their programmes must be overhauled every five years.
He said seven of the findings by the committee directly indicted the competencies of the EC, six out of which related directly to the competence of the head of IT Department and one to the district heads of the commission.
Section 8.4 and 8.14 of the findings states respectively that: “The commission did not know of the discrepancies before it came in the public domain”, “There were lapses in the implementation of adequate or sufficient data validation routines and procedures in the processes of the information technology department.”
Mr Nketiah said in the interest and security of the nation, the EC must reassign Mr Albert Arhin, the EC Director of Elections, and sack Mr E. Akomeah, the Head of IT Department of the EC.