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 quoted portions of the NPP reform proposals in which the opposition party proposed that the EC adopts satellite transmission of results to the National Tallying Center. To this end, the NPP also asked the EC to consider procuring hand-held scanners to transmit all pink sheets to Accra, the location of the national headquarters of the EC.

"The hand-held scanners have been budgets for. Government has been forced to provide the money and now is it not surprising that the NPP is kicking against the same e-transmission?", the NDC General Secretary noted.

The NDC also used the NPP's refusal to back a historic change in the date of the general elections as evidence of double standards.

He said in 2013, after "exhaustive deliberations" in Koforidua and Akosombo in the Eastern region, the NPP and all other parties backed the EC's plans to change the voting date from December 7 to November 7.

But at a crucial vote last month to legalise the three-year consensus, the NPP refused to support the NDC to effect the constitutional change that required bi-partisan support.

"All the NPP MPs sabotaged [it] and vote no", he expressed disappointment. The two-thirds majority was needed to pass constitutional amendment

According to Asiedu Nketia, the NPP has "now gained a notoriety for kicking against decisions of IPAC which they were part of"

For him, 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".

But in response, the NPP Campaign manager and IPAC representative Peter Mac Manu explained that the NPP is not against electronic transmission. It is against the EC inviting companies to bid for the electronic transmission of electoral results as it advertised in the Daily Graphic in February.

Peter Mac Manu

He said that if the EC has bought hand-held scanners to do the transmission why would it now invite companies to take over the transmission.

Peter Mac Manu also explained that the NPP withdrew its support for the November 7 date change because the EC had dragged its feet in taking steps to effect the constitutional changes.

He wondered why it had to take nearly three years for the Commission to table the amendment barely five months to November 7.

Referring to ECOWAS protocols, Peter Mac Manu said Ghana is a signatory to an international agreement not to pass electoral laws six months to an elections.

"We should not be rushing to change election laws four to five months to an elections" he criticized the Commission.  The NPP's support for the change was unconditional. "We didn’t agree in a vacuum", he said.

Peter Mac Manu said the date for elections can still be changed after the December 7 elections. For him "the journey [of democracy] continues.