SHOULD JEAN MENSAH RESIGN?
Our elders say, ” the cockroach cannot be innocent at a meeting of chickens” to wit, you cannot prove your innocence in the presence of people who have made up their minds about you.
This is the situation the Chairperson of the Electoral Commission, Jean Adukwei Mensah finds herself in now due to happening before, during and even after the 2024 Presidential Elections. She constantly found herself on the wrong side of the opposition NDC who subsequently won the elections.
Even before the swearing in of the new government on January 7th, 2025, the aide to the President-elect Joyce Bawa Mogtari has asked Jean Mensah to resign. This should be a message to her that the incoming government will not be smiling with her if she chooses to stay and every effort will be made to remove her from office.
Another saying has it that, “the memory of the dead should be a warning to the living”. She should take a cue from her predecessor Charlotte Osei who was also removed after the 2016 elections after some persons petitioned for that to happen.
Jean Mensah has been accused by both leading members and grassroot supporters in the NDC of working with the governing NPP to subvert the will of the people. The accusations started from the compilation of the voters register and her decision to use a cluster system for that exercise. The NDC during the exercise accused her of trying to disenfranchise Ghanaians as most people could not get access to the registration centers and this created a huge controversy.
Another accusation came up when the NDC demanded for a forensic auditing of the voters’ register which was fiercely opposed by the Electoral Commission and the governing NPP. This controversial demand led to the first ever live telecast of an Inter-Party Advisory Committee meeting of the EC.
I have also heard conversations among NDC supporters even prior to the elections insisting that Jean Mensah, Dr. Bossman Asare and a host of others they believe are surrogates of the NPP be sacked in the event they win power.
Upon reflecting on several happenings and the posturing of leading NDC members including the President-elect, I will suggest to persons close to Jean Mensah and other members of the Electoral Commission who have had issues with the incoming government, to advise them to quietly resign.
Their resignation will spare the Ghanaian populace the long process of setting up a committee after some surrogates of the incoming government file petitions against them.
Though I see this development of EC officials being sacked or forced to resign as a danger to our democracy, I think it will help us fashion out a good process of employing commissioners to the elections management body.