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Mahama Ayariga, Bawku central deputy, has indicated that amid the outbreak of COVID-19, the December 7 general elections may still have minimal health risks.
According to him, COVID-19 has presented the world with a special challenge, Ghana as a country must make a firm decision in the midst of this challenge on who governs the country, but it is certainly not the traditional way of gathering crowds to exercise its constitutional franchise.
Speaking on the Joy News PM Express on Tuesday night, the lawmaker argued that the 1992 Ghana Constitution, as it stands, faces a real constitutional crisis and also says nothing about what the country should do in terms of a global pandemic.
He further explained that the constitution only provides provisions on how the country can cope with emergency situations.
He said that the claim that the President of Parliament or the President of the Supreme Court can take over the areas of governance is neither here nor there because there is no specific provision in the constitution for that.
He explained that the President of the Supreme Court only takes over when the President, the Vice President and the Speaker are out of the country and this does not apply when the term of a president ends.
“I think we can find a mechanism to make the decisions that need to be made even with COVID-19, which includes holding an election with minimal health risks,” he said.
Intending to have a new voter registry, Mr. Ayariga believes that it will pose many risks to the health of Ghanaians and should be avoided.
He said there is a widespread assumption that voter registration is inflated because there are many names of people from a particular ethnic group who are perceived as NDC sympathizers, and therefore there should be a new one.
“A serious Electoral Commission can easily collaborate with the Togolese authorities to clean the registry if there is a strong belief in that statement, a fight on our electoral census because Togo has been able to register all its citizens in a national database as what the National Identification Authority (NIA) is trying to do it, “he emphasized.
