Professor Ransford Gyampo has argued that foreign election observers don’t do anything special when they come here to discharge their duties hence the country should stop relying on their expertise during elections.
The head of the Political Science Department at the University of Ghana further said for this reason, the local observers who chiefly do all the work only to be echoed by the foreigners, should be depended on heavily henceforth.
He made the comment on Joy FM’s news program ‘Top Story’ on Thursday while contributing to discussions about the recently released European Union Election Observer Mission’s (EU EOM) final report on the 2020 elections.
“I think as a country we must start kicking against foreign observer missions because they don’t say anything new that we don’t know already.
“They don’t say anything that important local election observation missions like the Coalition of Domestic Election Observers (CODEO) have said that they keep saying and is reported on. And so, I think as we are growing our democracy, we must begin to place much emphasis on our own, our local election observer missions, and what they say.”
He stressed further that bodies like the EU EOM hardly say anything new in their reports anyway: “I don’t see anything that the EU observer mission has said that we don’t know already.”
According to him, given that democracies cannot be consolidated in perpetuity, it was time to look within for crucial recommendations which we already know, thanks to highly skilled local groups.
SOURCE: www.Ghgossip.com
