Bernard Mornah’s reaction to CID invitation; I only cautioned the EC

admin May 28, 2020

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The Chairman of the Peoples National Convention (PNC), Mr Bernard Mornah has said he only cautioned the Electoral Commission (EC) on the chaos that could come up should it decide to go ahead with the new voters’ registration exercise.

The Criminal Investigations Department (CID) of the Ghana Police Service has invited Mr Mornah to assist with an investigation it is conducting into an allegation of threat against the EC, should it decide to go ahead with the compilation of a new voter’s register in late June 2020.

The police have sent an invitation letter to him asking that he should report at the CID headquarters on Tuesday, June 2, 2020, at 10 am.

“The CID Headquarters is investigating a case in which you were alleged to have threatened to resist any attempt by the Electoral Commission (EC) to compile a new voter’s register for the 2020 general election.”

“You were also heard in a video interview to have threatened “that people who are already Ghanaians and already registered are going to be taken out of the register, don’t you think confusion will come at the registration and if confusion come there, you think the EC staff will be safe, we will beat each other there, we will kill each other there if that is what the EC want to lead this nation to,” the invitation letter dated May 28, 2020 and signed by Barima Tweneboah Sasraku II, a Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCOP) for the Director General of CID said.

But in a radio interview on Accra based Citi FM on Thursday evening, Mr Mornah said his statement was a caution to the EC if it was “intending to flip us [Ghanaians] through this dangerous path, they should know that there would be confusion.”

“And so it is a caution. If cautions become threats, I will not run away from it. But you know, I don’t know who thought the CID English in school because my English teacher when he sees this statement will know that it is a caution and that he taught me English well, and that a caution cannot represent a threat. But if they see it as a threat, then I may have to bring my English teacher to tell them that caution is different from threat.”

Mr Mornah who reiterated that he made the statement at a press conference on May 26, 2020, organised by the Inter-Party Resistance Against New Register (IPRAN) insisted that “I have nothing run away from. The Electoral Commission is messing our democracy and we must do everything to resist and we will resist it. There is nothing that will allow us to sit down and allow this Electoral Commission to slip our democracy away from the peace and stability we have enjoyed.”

“And so when we are telling the Electoral Commission and alerting that your action can lead us on a very perilous path and you come and say that we are threatening, I don’t know, so I will visit the CID, I have told my lawyer that I will be going there and if my lawyer wants to come fine, but if my lawyer wants to water down the words, I will ask him to go because I am responsible enough to own my words.”