The Chairman of The Church of Pentecost and President of the Ghana Pentecostal and Charismatic Council (GPCC), Apostle Eric Nyamekye, has urged the Electoral Commission(EC) of Ghana to always go ahead of politicians by educating the public on its activities and issues.
He said this while briefing the media after a meeting between the two institutions.
The Ghana Pentecostal and Charismatic Council (GPCC) on Wednesday had a meeting with the Electoral Commission to discuss issues concerning the upcoming elections.
The meeting was a platform to ask questions, make suggestions and inputs and to enhance the work of the EC in terms of communication, education amongst others.
It was also part of the EC’s stakeholder engagements to share with stakeholders its programme of activities for the 2024 election and also seek feedback and guidance to ensure the work of the EC is well grounded in law and ensure the outcome of their work is peace and stability.
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Speaking to the media after a closed door meeting, Apostle Eric Nyamekye encouraged the EC to do more education to enable Ghanains understand their issues better.
“We think that the EC should always go ahead of the politicians and so when they have an IPAC meetings, they should issue a communique so that people will know what really happened instead of reacting to what politicians say,” He said.
Apostle Nyamekye said on an issue like the use of indelible ink, not many Ghanaians understand the issues, urging the EC to educate the people more on it as well as the election calendar, ie voting, registering et al.
“We will also do our best as a council to support their work because Ghana is our country , we do not have any other country and in an election year, we all have to come on board and make sure that Ghana wins, not any political party,” he added.
For Political parties, He pleaded with them to put Ghana first, urging them to put their strategies together, adding that their strategies is not supposed to overrun the principles that they know will govern a peaceful election.
“We are also aware of the monetization of elections that go on in our nation, we want to plead with them to please respect Ghana and then they should make sure that they do not deceive people by giving them money just to vote for them in an election. Let the people vote because of the issue, the policies and the manifestos that they hear, instead of influencing them with money,” he said.
He also pleaded with the security agencies to play their role without any compromise.
The Chairperson for the Electoral Commission, Mrs Jean Mensa also welcomed the suggestions made by the Ghana Pentecostal and Charismatic Council to take charge of its communication and education.
“It was a very good meeting, we received extensive feedback from the leadership of the Ghana Pentecostal and Charismatic Council, a feedback that will help strengthen and deepen the integrity and credibility of our electoral process. This is the first point of call, we will be visiting some of the media houses, we will be visiting the GJA and the leadership, we will be visiting some traditional authorities and we will end with visiting the political parties in the coming weeks.
Speaking about going ahead of the political parties in terms of communications, Mrs Jean Mensa stated that,”I think this is an area we have not done so well on and it is an area we intend to strengthen, to communicate and to provide information to the citizenry, it is a key aspect of our work.”
She continued,”In 2020, we set up the ‘let the citizen know’ platform, we intend to strengthen that and to strengthen our communication and to provide information, to share information because information helps to do away with suspicion that would usually characterise our work so we have taken that point. I think we did accept that it was an area that we needed to further strengthen and so we are going back to the drawing board and these are things that we would look at and the idea is to enrich discourse and to provide the truth, the facts and information to the citizenry.”
Ghana| Atinkaonline.com| Porcia Oforiwaa Ofori
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