Executive Director of IMANI Center for Policy and Education, Franklin Cudjoe, has formally petitioned the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) to investigate the Electoral Commission (EC) of Ghana for what he describes as “constitutional, statutory, and administrative breaches” in connection with the controversial disposal of electoral equipment as scrap.
In a petition to CHRAJ on Tuesday, May 6, 2025, and signed by Franklin Cudjoe, IMANI argued that the EC has failed in its duty to manage state assets prudently, especially amid Ghana’s ongoing economic crisis.
“This morning, I directed that IMANI files a petition to the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice to investigate the Electoral Commission of Ghana for constitutional, statutory, and administrative breaches in respect of its conduct in the infamous ‘firesale of electoral equipment for scrap’ scandal.
“At a time when the nation cannot service its debts and is in the midst of a tight IMF-supervised fiscal regime, such egregious conduct cannot be tolerated,” it noted.
IMANI further argued that the premature retirement and disposal of tens of thousands of laptops, fingerprint verifiers, scanners, printers, and digital cameras were driven by motives that conflict with the EC’s legal responsibilities.
“We lamented that the EC’s conduct… has been motivated by a conflict between its duties under various laws to judiciously apply the resources of this country for the good of the citizenry, on the one hand, and its tendency to take decisions favourable to various commercial vendors and transactors, on the other hand.
“We stated our belief that the EC’s most recent conduct has been necessitated by a need to curtail transparency and accountability, and thus was motivated by a collective conflict of interest and potential corruption,” it stated.
IMANI also accused the EC of attempting to erase “inventory records and physical evidence of the blatant falsehoods it has told over the last four years regarding the purchase history of expensive electoral equipment.”
It stressed that many of the devices cost over US$3,000 each and should have been donated to other government agencies or transparently sold under the Public Procurement Act.
“We posit that the EC’s approach to disposing of these electoral items was partly dictated by a need to suppress inventory records and to evade accountability, in light of the spirited campaign by civil society activists in 2020 to debunk the EC’s claims that the equipment in question all date from 2011, and are therefore obsolete, and partly by a need to facilitate undue commercial profiteering by the beneficiaries of the EC’s disposal methods. The abuse of public resources and power for private gain is the universally acknowledged definition of corruption.
“Ultimately, the EC’s conduct in this affair breaches the high standards expected of such a major constitutional body, and constitutes other infractions of laws, regulations, and standard protocols relating to the management of electoral systems, data protection, and public financial management,” it added.
In 2020, the EC undertook a controversial procurement exercise to replace the country’s existing Biometric Voter Management System (BVMS), which includes biometric devices, voter registration kits, ABIS software, and data centers.
The EC justified this move by claiming the existing system, in use since 2011, was obsolete.
However, IMANI Center for Policy and Education disputed this claim, revealing that many of the devices were acquired as recently as 2018 and 2019, and that the EC had previously maintained a practice of replacing only faulty components rather than entire units.
Despite this, the EC, backed by the Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo-led government, proceeded with a costly procurement of entirely new BVMS components.
The process was marred by allegations of bid rigging, manipulation, and lack of transparency, particularly regarding the ABIS software.
In 2024, IMANI discovered thousands of these supposedly obsolete devices dumped at a recycling facility in Accra, raising suspicions of attempts to erase inventory records and avoid accountability.
Read IMANI’s full petition below:
