Jean Mensa – EC Chairperson
The
Electoral Commission (EC) has upgraded its data system as part of an
overhauling exercise of the elections management body, the Chairperson of the
commission, Mrs. Jean Mensa, has announced.
Mrs.
Mensa said this when she called on President Akufo-Addo as part of an ongoing
meeting with stakeholders of the electoral system.
She
said the ongoing overhauling of the commission had been necessitated by the
non-functioning of some key departments and obsolete systems.
Throwing
more light on the new technology, she recalled how the EC last year invited an
European Union recommended biometric consultant from Canada, whom she said spent 10 days working on the
subject.
The
view of the consultant, she said, was since technology is an evolving
phenomenon there was the need to respond to the reality.
According
to her, the consultant recommended a modern user friendly technology – both
software and hardware – that would cost less than what the EC used to pay to a
foreign vendor for a similar exercise.
Continuing,
she indicated that the new software would cost between $30 million and $56 million,
which she said was an upgrade.
“It
was just to upgrade a data centre and it entails changing batteries here and
there, among other things,” she added.
Biggest Challenge
The
biggest challenge that confronted EC new managers since assuming office was the
effect of the very weak state of the commission, she pointed out.
The
EC, in the state she took over, was an institution “not founded on rules; it
was not founded on administrative policies and it didn’t have a governance
framework.”
According
to her, “We came to office and what we found was that we do not even have a
single policy to guide procurement, to guide finance, to guide HR, to guide
administration; nothing existed.”
“So
in a nutshell, the commission existed as some sort of an election machine and
over the year we’ve spent quite a lot of effort trying to pluck the loopholes
to the best of our knowledge and to the best of our ability; it’s been run as a
free for all sort of institution to date…you’d find staff who have been in the
same for 15-17 years without promotion,” he noted with worry.
KPMG Audit
Since
assuming office, she said “we’ve tried to the best of our ability to come up
with some policies and guidelines to structure and to regulate our operations.”
KPMG is working on an institutional assessment for the commission, she added.
Delight
“We
are pleased to note that we’ve done all the promotions; we’ve gone around the
country; we’ve undertaken promotions and there is boost in morale currently
within the staff,” she disclosed.
Mrs.
Mensa said “currently, we have a clear direction of the institution … what each
department is meant to do; so we have a governing framework of a sort that
regulates our activities.”
Legal Department
The
EC, she said, does not have standard departments such as legal. The existing
ones are weak and in some such as the procurement there are only a few staff
members. “You go into procurement; if you look at the level of our procurement,
running into millions of cedis, we just had a two-member staff…so we are
recruiting with the assistance of KPMG, setting up a Legal Department, a Public
Affairs Department among others and basically strengthening capacity, bringing
on board new staff in the area of IT.”
New EC
She told the President that the EC under her and her commissioners is robust and ready to take on the assignments required of it.
By Charles Takyi-Boadu, Presidential Correspondent
