Osei Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu
The Majority Leader and Minister of Parliamentary Affairs, Osei Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu, has said that the constant bastardisation and denigration of the Chairperson of the Electoral Commission (EC) is as a result of her decision to stop the “unending thievery” at the commission.
According to him, some officials of the EC were “stealing $4 million annually from the country on the back of servicing the commission’s data centre during the era of the immediate past commissioners, three of whom were dismissed for abuse of office.
Speaking in an interview with TV3 on Wednesday, the Majority Leader said people who were used to the “old corrupt system of the past wanted that to continue. But this woman comes and she says no. Let us begin afresh.”
Mr. Kyei-Mensah-Bonsu indicated that Mrs. Mensa then became a target of bastardisation by the beneficiaries of “the corrupt system” for stopping the thievery from festering, adding “most of the allegations that they levelled against the EC were unfounded.”
He said this accounted for the baseless allegations and propagandist claims against her by the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC).
He asserted that the NDC, since leaving office, had attempted on countless occasions to smear the current EC Chairperson with several unsubstantiated allegations, but their motive has not worked for them.
“They just don’t want to speak the truth,” he said and continued that since assuming office, the current leadership of the electoral management body had demonstrated that it wanted credible, transparent, free and fair elections for Ghana.
“Then we had a system – the old Data Centre. That was very old and the computers had become old such that they needed to be changed. We had former Electoral Commissioners who were telling us that they were servicing the Data Centre at the cost of $4 million every year.”
“This woman comes and she goes there and realises that no servicing or maintenance was going on. What does it mean? People were stealing $4 million from this country in every four years,” the Majority Leader emphasized.
According to him, Jean and her team had succeeded in building a data recovery system that provides backups in the event that the system is hacked into by criminals at cheaper cost; yet some people are bent on smearing her for disallowing a corruption festering system.
By Ernest Kofi Adu