Bernard Mornah
The National Chairman of the People’s National Convention (PNC), Bernard Mornah, has attracted a Criminal Investigations Department (CID) invitation over his voter registration death threats remarks earlier in the week.
The ominous remarks were made during a press conference organized by a so-called Inter-Party Resistance Against New Register (IPRANR) to condemn the EC’s intended registration exercise.
His invitation signed by DCOP/Mr. Barima Tweneboah Sasraku II for the Director General/CID comes on the heels of a similar pronouncement by retired Major Boakye Gyan, who also threatened civil war should there be a compilation of a new voters’ register for which he too made a date at the CID headquarters and has since been granted bail.
Bernard Mornah’s threats which he later sought to pour cold water on by describing it as only a ‘caution’ while speaking on a radio station warned about beatings and killings during the voter registration exercise with EC staff as the main target because, as he put it, “some Ghanaians are going to be disenfranchised.”
“People who are already Ghanaians and already registered are going to be taken out of the voters’ register. Don’t think confusion will come at the registration station but if confusion comes there, you think the EC staff will be safe? We will beat each other there and will kill each other there if that is what the EC wants to lead this nation to,” he said during a press conference.
He is expected to be at the CID headquarters on Tuesday June 2, 2020 at 10 a.m., an invitation which he said he would honour.
Still defiant in his characteristic hatred for the EC, he said he still stands by his words, saying “I have said that if the Electoral Commission is intending to lead us through this dangerous path, it should know that there will be confusion…It is a caution. If caution becomes threats, I will not run away from it.”
For him, a caution does not represent a threat but if the law enforcers take it as such, he said “then I may have to bring my English teacher to tell them that cautions are not threats.”
“The EC is slitting our democracy and we must do everything to resist it and we will resist it,” he declared.
“There is nothing that will allow you to sit down and allow this EC to slit our democracy away from the peace and stability that we have enjoyed so when we are telling them and alerting them that their actions can lead us unto a perilous path and you say we are threatening, I don’t know. I will visit the CID,” he said.
His position is at variance with the official position of his party whose Director of Communications, Emmanuel Wilson Jnr., in a correspondence on the subject, stated that “… it is prudent to get a new machine and that, coupled with the creation of the new regions, we believe a compilation of a new voters register is in order.”
Some individuals who have been speaking on the matter and purporting to demonstrate against the compilation of the new register did not do so on its (PNC) behalf.
It would appear that the communications director is dissociating the chairman’s position from the party’s, a visible crack in the front of the political grouping.
By A.R. Gomda