Damp on KNUST SRC polls

The urgency of the hour calls for leaders of wise judgement and sound integrity, leaders not in love with money, but in love with justice; leaders not in love with publicity, but in love with humanity; leaders who can subject their particular egos to the greatness of the cause - DR MARTIN LUTHER KING.

As a former student leader, and particularly because our university campuses have become incubators for hatching our current crop of politicians, I hold the view that it is imperative that things that affect university students, especially their electoral processes, must engage national attention. It is in that spirit that I am commenting on the latest Students Representative Council elections at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology. 

Many of the students are befuddled about the outcomes of the recent elections, especially because of some of the developments that dogged the processes. Some are of the feeling that members of the election committee did not play it fair or live above board and while there may not be any concrete evidence to indict any of those heading the process, there is widespread suspicion that the elections were not free and fair.

To those who might be tempted to suggest that this is not a matter for national discourse and must thus not be a subject for me to be thinking aloud, I can only proffer what Dr Luther King said when he was accused of being an outsider when he spoke about the disturbances in Birmingham thus, “I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the eighth century prophets left their little villages and carried their thus saith the Lord far beyond the boundaries of their hometowns; and just as the Apostle Paul left his little village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to practically every hamlet and city of the Graeco-Roman world, I too am compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my particular hometown. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid…. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Yes, I cannot sit in my little corner at Graphic Communications Group Limited in Accra while elections at the KNUST are noted to have been fraught with anomalies. I am merely attempting to highlight a development that has caused great dissatisfaction among some students at the KNUST because of dependence on technology which did not work satisfactorily, either by default or design.

It is alleged that KNUST used an innovation of electronic voting. However, due to difficulties, only three out of 25 voting centres worked above average. At some of the centres the process was interrupted for more than four hours, killing the desire of many students to exercise their franchise. Indeed, the halls of residence, which traditionally served as polling stations, were not used for lack of network connectivity that could allow electronic voting.

In 2012, the Pink Sheet became the focus in the Presidential Election Petition. Thankfully,  Mr Akoto Ampaw saved the whole country another electoral dispute in 2016 when he got the Supreme Court to direct the Electoral Commission to make copies of the Pink Sheet available to the candidates and paste a copy at the collation centre. That enabled the two main political parties, the New Patriotic Party and the National Democratic Congress, to state whether they were leading or winning with some measure of certainty. That is why although the Chairperson of the EC insisted that they had not received enough of the certified Pink Sheets, within minutes of former President John Dramani Mahama conceding defeat, the EC organised a press conference with prepared speech and collated results.

It may well be that the KNUST does not need electronic voting for as long as somebody could hack into the system and corrupt the details. The students could stick to the printed ballot papers which would be counted at the halls of residence as soon as voting is over and results from each hall made available to candidates.

In the mass media environment, accuracy is preferred to speed. Nobody must in the name of technology deny voters their right to determine who leads them. What happened at the KNUST cannot be applauded as a worthy experiment. Those connected with the process must accept that their best was not good enough.  It is a damp on them.

It may not be possible to annul the results but one lesson is that the use of the ballot paper could prove more reliable than electronic voting.

On that note I salute all the candidates, especially those who genuinely feel cheated but have accepted the results or are about to challenge the outcome through lawful means.