Policy think tank IMANI Center for Policy and Education has disclosed that it has a damning dossier on the Electoral Commission mismanagement of the country’s resources.
According to IMANI, their fight for transparency and accountability leading to the conduct of elections on December 7 is “a long term one”, entrenching their relentless position in seeing to the resolution of the matter.
“We have more damning information about the dangerous and depraved ways the current EC management is spending Ghana’s money. As we have stated repeatedly, our campaign for true transparency and accountability, especially in financial dealings, at the EC is a long-term one.
“IMANI is dogged, relentless and committed in this struggle to see the EC account to the good people of Ghana and, by doing so, to restore the trust that it has dissipated by its naked lies and procurement abuses.
It noted that it is very much in the interest of the EC’s enablers and advisors “to counsel it to embrace true transparency and accountability”, because every day “they substitute sham theatrics for the real thing”, they deplete valuable trust that would be so essential in “maintaining the peace and steadiness of our democratic experiment should another highly competitive election bring us close to the tensions we saw in 2008”.
Unraveling the “real transparency issue”, the policy think quipped a “more worrying thing” being the “diversionary and distractive nature of these types of poorly thought through efforts to hoodwink the public about the EC’s actual conduct”.
“Instead of reckless data dumping masquerading as ‘transparency in governance’, we would like to draw the EC’s attention to its many unaddressed procurement and spending problems, where much accountability, and dare we add, transparency, shall be much better appreciated”.
According to IMANI, the Electoral Commission’s decision to make it easy for people to build a database of voter ID cards linked to polling stations adds little value to the process of ensuring transparency.
As such, if someone has a need to know the voter ID number of another person, “there should be a process to establish that need and a means to restrict the knowledge to that need only in the classic ‘need to know’ fashion”.
“The Voter ID card linked to the age, name and polling station of an individual is much too similar to the KYC profile of most people held at the banks, telcos and utility companies in this country for it to receive anything other than standard data security protection.
“There is no reason to make it easy for people to scoop the data and automate its use for micro targeting, a situation more likely to facilitate abusive political telemarketing than to empower citizens”.
Touching on the EC’s “choice of technology standard”, it noted that, the EC decision to use Google Drive to manage the online publication process was “to the shock of many IT governance experts”.
“It is widely known that personal identifiable data is not adequately protected in Google Drive (see sample thinking: https://help.uis.cam.ac.uk/service/collaboration/g-suite/google-data-security). Much worse when that identifiable data is also supposed to be government-managed data.
“To use a standard GSuite license without the necessary certifications not only to store, but also to distribute, and enable redistribution, of Government of Ghana data in a Google Drive folder is the height of irresponsibility”.
IMANI further cautioned the EC as its “incessant need to PR its way out of its credibility issues is bound to have serious repercussions in this country”.
