• 20 out of 26 assembly members refuse to participate in MCE confirmation
• Police, military deployed to Juaben
• Traditional Council fails to mediate for MCE’s confirmation
Members of the Juaben Municipality in the Ashanti Region are reported to have refused to participate in an election process to confirm the president’s chief executive nominee for the assembly.
According to a JoyNews report sighted by GhanaWeb, about 20 out of some 26 members of the assembly on Monday, November 1, 2021, boycotted the confirmation of Alex Sarfo Kantanka as MCE.
This comes after an earlier intervention by the Juaben Traditional Authority to resolve an impasse surrounding the exercise.
According to the assembly members, their decision to boycott the exercise stems from the heavy police and military deployment to the area ahead of the exercise.
Meanwhile the Director of the Faculty of Academic Affairs and Research at the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre (KAIPTC) has spoken against the deployment of the heavy military during elections, describing it as a recipe for subversion of democracy.
“Using those weapons of violence or threatening to use them if and when necessary, hollows out the process, hollows out our institutions and makes it easy for subversion,” he stated in an interview with JoyNews.
According to Prof. Aning who further described such actions as dangerous and slippery, “democracy works best when it’s not threatened or coerced [but] it dies when under the guise of performing our democratic responsibilities, institutions and individuals are coerced to function in a particular way and make particular decisions that are undemocratic but are clothed in the garb of democracy.”