• Seats in Ghana’s Parliament could rise to 300 by 2024
• This is according to Minority Leader Haruna Iddrisu
• He says the NDC has picked up hints that the EC wants to add 25 seats to the existing 275
Minority Leader Haruna Iddrisu has hinted that the Electoral Commission, EC, is seeking to create 25 new constituencies before the next general elections.
According to him, the EC was seeking the new electoral structures using the impasse around Santrokofi, Akpafu, Lolobi and Likpe, SALL. People of SALL did not vote in the last parliamentary election and did not get a nominee for District Chief Executive.
Haruna said in an interview on a local TV channel last week that the National Democratic Congress, NDC, was going to resist the new constituencies which will take the number of seats in Parliament to 300 from the current 275.
“We are picking up signals that the Electoral Commission intends creating new additional constituencies of about 25 with 11 of it in just one region of the country. We will resist it,” he said on Accra-based Citi TV’s Point of View programme.
“The EC is working to create additional constituencies using SALL and from what I’m hearing they may want 11 of those seats to be in just one region of the country. With the other 12, 10, 15 split among other populous regions like the Greater Accra region and others.
He did not disclose the region that was due to get the bumper increase, except to add: “I’m saying that the NDC we are determined to seek major electoral reforms in 2024 and we will not accept anything short of those reforms.”
In comments seemingly backing the call by former President John Dramani Mahama that supporters should police voted at the polling station, he said: “We are not going to accept the declaration of results at any regional level. Let all polling stations impact on the 50 plus one percent.
“For purposes of elections, Ghana is demarcated into constituencies that is why you have polling stations so for Presidential results, it is not for nothing that the constitution says that the Chairperson of the Electoral Commission is the returning officer.
“So every constituency results must be declared at the National level by the chairperson of the electoral commission and not any regional collation and it should be a computation of polling station outcomes aggregated into a whole,” he told Bernard Avle in an interview on Citi TV.
“Ghana for electoral purpose is demarcated into constituencies that is why you have polling stations so Presidential results is not for nothing that the constitution says that the Chairperson of the Electoral Commission is the returning officer so every constituency results must be declared at the National level by the chairperson of the electoral commission and not any regional collation and it should be a computation of polling station outcomes aggregated into the whole,” he told Bernard Avle in an interview on Citi TV.
GNA Report – EC failed to create new Guan Constituency
A source at the Electoral Commission told the Ghana News Agency in December 2020 – after the general elections – that the EC was unable to create the Guan Constituency because the Constitutional Instrument needed to create the constituency, could not have matured in the 7th Parliament.
Parliament went on recess on November 9, for the December elections and resumed on December 14.
The source said the EC could not lay the Constitutional Instrument (CI) for amendment of the creation of Constituencies because the 7th Parliament could not sit for 21 days before its dissolution at midnight, January 6, 2021.
“If we had initiated the process in the 7th Parliament, the CI could not have matured. In that case, the process will have to start all over again in the 8th Parliament,” the source said.
“The C I to be laid will have to stay in Parliament for 21 sitting days and come into force if 2/3s of Members of Parliament allows its journey. It is after the passage of the amended C I that the EC can contemplate the holding of any election in that created Constituency,” the source inforned.
Source: www.ghanaweb.com
