IMANI Africa: Ghana’s EC’s dangerous and pathological conduct

Very few have actually looked at the substance of IMANI’s case, which was mainly that Ghana’s biometric voting management system (BVMS) had cost the nation tens of millions of dollars to put together, was still in good shape, and needed only minor maintenance to be fit for the purpose of running the 2020 elections.

The Electoral Commission did everything it could to twist the facts, hide information, and outright lie to justify its decision to jettison the existing BVMS so that it could procure a brand-new one.

A few days ago, our colleague, Bright Simons, who continues to monitor the EC closely discovered that the EC had been sneaking out biometric devices that are core components of the BVMS to recycling companies without any public notice.

The EC’s press statement was full of lies, half-truths, and pure fantasies.

The EC says that only 10 biometric verification devices (BVDs) were “auctioned”. And that they “found their way” into a recycling plant. The obvious questions that the media ought to ask are a) before the EC jettisoned the existing system, it had told Parliament that it had implemented a “2 BVDs per polling station” policy and therefore had more than 70,000 BVDs in stock.

Then in 2020, it proceeded to buy a brand new set of biometric voter registration (BVR) kits with corresponding BVD kits and swore (despite video evidence collected by Bright Simons) that they never used any of the pre-existing devices in the 2020 mass voter registration exercise.

Ghanaians who have been paying attention to the EC’s strange conduct under the current leadership know that the EC admitted to have lost some BVRs recently, but when pushed it insisted that they were only five in number.

What exactly is going on?The EC claims that the 10 BVDs were auctioned, and that they just somehow then found their way into a recycling plant.

IMANI painstakingly checked, and found out that refurbishment would have cost less than 10% of what the EC spent because many of the devices were barely two years old and had been used only once.The EC has consistently lied about the “obsolescence” of the biometric infrastructure that they came to meet and which they spent precious money to augment.

Here are pictures of mounds of biometric devices that cast serious doubts on the EC’s claims that it only auctioned 10 BVDs:

8.