Presidential Candidate in this year’s University of Ghana Students Representative Council elections, Graham Oduro, has described the SRC Electoral Commissioner as incompetent for failing to organize a successful election today.
The candidate expressed his utmost dissatisfaction relating to the entire voting process.
Speaking to UniverNews, he bemoaned the EC’s failure to officially keep the relevant stakeholders in the loop with regard to the challenges faced and the decisions taken at the end voting process.
“I really don’t know what’s going on, but as I said earlier, I’m very dissatisfied with the whole process, and as it stands now, I have not received any official communication whatsoever yet information pertaining to the nullifying [of the election]. We have been campaigning, going to four campuses, going here and there, meeting people, abandoning studies despite a whole lot of things, and finally, when we get to the day of the election, we say okay by 5:30, we are done, but there are issues I mean. The electoral commissioner, if you are not being proactive enough, then clearly you are not competent, and he doesn’t have to even be a representation of the students or whatever, it is sheer incompetence,” he said.
Graham Oduro further bemoaned the poor nature of the voting system and blamed it for the low voter turnout in the elections.
“As we speak, I have not been able to cast my vote. For my running mate, he has not even received the link, not to talk of even voting, and I ask myself, how did we get here? What kind of a system are we operating? what kind of system are we running? It’s interesting, per the information I’m getting from the strong room, they say the total number of people who are supposed to vote is above fifty thousand and as it stands now, only four thousand people have voted. This doesn’t even represent even 10 percent of the entire number, so I really don’t know what the problem is, and I assume these issues could have been addressed earlier, especially when the distance education students had similar issues, with city campus students they similar issues which means that these things have happened twice already this week, but yet still we sat and not proactive enough to handle these issues and in this come Election Day and we are still stranded,” he added.
The elections have, however, been rescheduled to Friday, October 28, 2022.
This was disclosed to UniversNews by the University of Ghana Computing Systems (UGCS) Chief Information Technology Officer (CITO), Mr. Francis Boachie.
According to Mr. Boachie, the number of students trying to access the site at the same time is what has led to these challenges.
“We must go and prepare the environment better because this is the first time we’re going the whole school. We didn’t forsee some of these challenges. So today and tomorrow will give us enough time to make sure the enviromnent is better for friday. It also gives the aspirants more time to do more campaigning and then we can be ready very well on Friday.”
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Story by: Kelly Adjetey Boye | univers.ug.edu.gh
