A leading member of the National Reform Party (NRP), Dr David Percy has called for the institution of a national identification system to end the debate on the credibility of the voters register.
In 2008, the National Identification Authority (NIA) began registering Ghanaians to help the state to get the data of the citizens.
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He said this is the only cure to the New Patriotic Party’s (NPP) mischief in their demand for a new voters register.
The NPP has been mounting pressure on the Electoral Commission to create a new register ahead of the 2016 general elections. They claim that the current registers bloated with over 70,000 non-Ghanaians registered.
The founder of the Progressive People’s Party (PPP), Dr Papa Kwesi Nduom has also suggested that the National ID should be used to sanitise the system.
The mass registration exercise was completed in seven regions and parts of the three northern regions. However, not every citizen who registered for the issuance of the NIA card has received his or her card.
In 2014, the Authority contracted a $115 million loan facility from the Exim Bank to undertake a fresh registration of all Ghanaians under an expanded registration project.
Speaking on Radio Gold’s Alhaji and Alhaji programme on Saturday, Dr. Percy said: “I think that it is about time we brought this matter up – the issue of the national ID system that will be used for all the purposes that any civilized, intelligent people use to search information so that we can cure the basis for the mischief by political desperados who have noting good for us.”
According to him, the nation has so far wasted at least, a month on debating the credibility of the register – a matter which he says was “founded on bad faith and driven by political mischief that uses entirely dubious methods and makes conclusions and suggestions for our national action which are absurd, childish and indeed, idiotic.”
“Ordinarily, in any civilized society, such nonsense will not be allowed to last for one hour and it will be laughed out of court but thanks to their accomplices in the media and the complicity of my friends in the NDC, this nonsense has gone on for a month and it is likely to go on for much more time,” he complained.