Franklin Cudjoe, the Executive Director of IMANI Center for Policy and Education has petitioned the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) to investigate Jean Mensa-led Electoral Commission.
IMANI alleged that the Electoral Commission breached constitutional, statutory and administrative in the sale of electoral equipment.
On Tuesday, May 6, 2025, in a petition signed by Franklin Cudjoe, IMANI claimed that the EC has failed in its duty to manage state assets prudently, especially amid Ghana’s ongoing economic crisis.
“This morning, I directed that IMANI files a petition to the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice to investigate the Electoral Commission of Ghana for constitutional, statutory, and administrative breaches in respect of its conduct in the infamous ‘firesale of electoral equipment for scrap’ scandal.
“At a time when the nation cannot service its debts and is in the midst of a tight IMF-supervised fiscal regime, such egregious conduct cannot be tolerated,” it noted.
“We lamented that the EC’s conduct… has been motivated by a conflict between its duties under various laws to judiciously apply the resources of this country for the good of the citizenry, on the one hand, and its tendency to take decisions favourable to various commercial vendors and transactors, on the other hand.
“We stated our belief that the EC’s most recent conduct has been necessitated by a need to curtail transparency and accountability, and thus was motivated by a collective conflict of interest and potential corruption,” it stated.
IMANI further alleged that the EC is attempting to erase “inventory records and physical evidence of the blatant falsehoods it has told over the last four years regarding the purchase history of expensive electoral equipment.”
“We posit that the EC’s approach to disposing of these electoral items was partly dictated by a need to suppress inventory records and to evade accountability, in light of the spirited campaign by civil society activists in 2020 to debunk the EC’s claims that the equipment in question all date from 2011, and are therefore obsolete, and partly by a need to facilitate undue commercial profiteering by the beneficiaries of the EC’s disposal methods. The abuse of public resources and power for private gain is the universally acknowledged definition of corruption.
“Ultimately, the EC’s conduct in this affair breaches the high standards expected of such a major constitutional body, and constitutes other infractions of laws, regulations, and standard protocols relating to the management of electoral systems, data protection, and public financial management,” it added.
Meanwhile, CHARJ has agreed to investigate the Electoral Commission’s (EC) conduct in the retirement and disposal of some election-related equipment.
See the post below:
Another demo loading hahaha pic.twitter.com/mnzmiW9ylW
— KALYJAY (@gyaigyimii) May 6, 2025
