By Kantam Juicy
The Centre for Democratic Development, CDD Ghana, is pushing for journalists and media houses to move beyond electoral observations to monitoring and reporting on human rights perspectives during elections.
It said that over the years, media reports have been centered on the technical aspects of elections, ignoring the very people for which the elections are held for.
Senior Programmes Officer in Charge of Human Rights and Social Inclusion, CDD Ghana, Michael Augustus Akahbor, who made this remark in a presentation at a two-capacity training workshop in Kumasi, said in any electoral process, it is the citizens who are most important. Joyce Kantam Kolamong and Akosua Frema Frempong have filed this report
Elections in Ghana have been focused on political parties, electoral reforms, electoral commission, voting process, and legislative framework, among others losing sight of the fact that amid every election, lies the citizenry who are more important. Stakeholders are of the notion that Ghana has gradually become an electoral democracy where everything is about political parties without taking into consideration issues that the citizens are struggling with and making that the reasons why elections are held.
The capacity-building workshop was on electoral reforms that seek to empower journalists and media practitioners to play a more informed and constructive role in promoting transparent and credible electoral processes. Additionally, the workshop seeks to equip the participants with knowledge, skills, and ethical guidelines to enable them to contribute to the integrity and legitimacy of democratic elections.
Senior Programmes Officer in Charge of Human Rights and Social Inclusion, CDD Ghana, Michael Augustus Akagbor, encouraged journalists to pay attention to snippet of information on voters during the upcoming general elections. He said, “so what we are pushing at CDD is that we need to move beyond electoral observations to monitoring from the human rights perspective and that means that all the things we are doing, we need to include the human agency of the citizens who are going to make decisions.
So we need to focus on issues like gender and how is that our electoral system operates in a way that there are less women in political participation. Have we analyzed as journalists to see what the structural inhibitions are and have we really interrogated to know whether the things we think are the reasons women are not in politics are really the reasons why they are not?”.
Mr. Akagbor said the country has not been able to address the human rights aspect of voters considering the fact that elections have always been characterised by chaos, intimidations and violence, ” “In societies that human rights thrive and exist, there’s less electoral conflict because we respect each other’s right so if we are in that kind of society where we make human rights the foundation upon which our democracy rests, where we respect the rights of difference, descent, free participation in the electoral process, this chaos will not arise.
The fact that we even have to have military people engage in an electoral process is in itself an intimidation to certain persons and we need to figure out how are we infringing the rights of citizens by bringing in military personnel, so these are some of the considerations we should be talking about”.
He quizzed why the country has not been able to solve consistent chaos after so many years of elections and charged Journalists to ask these tough questions from actors who are putting themselves up for political office.
The workshop was organized by Ghana Center for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana), with funding from the European Union (EU), as part of a project aimed at promoting the implementation of electoral reforms that will enhance the credibility, transparency and peacefulness of Ghana’s 2024 general elections.
