The Chairman of Ghana's Electoral Commission, Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, Wednesday said free and fair elections are the collective responsibility of all stakeholders in the electoral process.

Afari-Gyan said this when he paid a courtesy call on Chairman, Independence Electoral Commission (INEC), Professor Maurice Iwu, saying all necessary reforms of the electoral process to be carried out must be extended to internal and external environments.

He said, to have free and fair elections, it will always be better to proceed from the premise that it was a collective responsibility of all stakeholders in the electoral process. He insisted that for any electoral reforms to succeed, it must be carried out in the internal and external environments.

“You can have a very good framework, but most of the work is done externally. Reforms should not be limited to the Commission, it should involve the larger environment," he argued. He said it was often convenient, especially from the view of political practitioners, to blame the election management body alone, absolving the environment and practitioners.

Afari-Gyan, who was lauded for the successful conduct of elections in his country, revealed that they had a lot of problems in Ghana, but were helped by bringing together parties to partake in the commission’s activities such as voter registration. He advised INEC to create a forum where it would frequently interface with political parties and civil society groups, adding that, “getting together to talk helps. It is not a statutory body but collaboration helps to resolve difficulties.”

In his response, Iwu said the commission takes reforms seriously and was trying to change the attitude of the external environment through vigorous voter education and the internal one through capacity building.

Iwu said INEC's experiment with using members of the National Youth Service Corps(NYSC) was yielding considerable fruits as opposed to the use of ad hoc staff who could abandon the poll on election day. Afari-Gyan was a member of the Peer Review Committee that made inputs into Nigeria’s 2007 general elections. He is also a consultant to the Senate Retreat on review of the 1999 Constitution on Electoral Matters.


From Senator Iroegbu in Abuja
Source: www.thisdayonline.com