The General Secretary of the NPP, John Boadu, on Sunday, July 14, left Ghana for Senegal, together with other members of the Representative of the People’s Amendment Law (ROPAL) Implementations Committee to participate in series of consultative engagements on ROPAL implementation in the country. The team will thereafter engage Ghanaians living in Gambia and Cape Verde as part of the consultative process.
The committee, which was set up by the Electoral Commission of Ghana to work out the modalities for the full implementation of ROPAL in Ghana following a court ruling for the law to be implemented, has, since its formation, been holding consultative meetings with stakeholders and public fora in all regions of the country to solicit inputs into the operationalization of the law.
As part of the rollout of its mandate, the committee, having held extensive consultations in the country, is now set to hold similar exercise with Ghanaians living abroad, and also, to visit some selected countries in Africa and elsewhere across the globe that are currently implementing similar laws on external voting with the view to learning from best practices.
John Boadu, who represents the governing NPP on the ROPAL Implementation Committee was part of the team that travelled to Senegal on Sunday to understudy how the francophone country is successfully implementing external voting regime. The team is being led by the Chairman of the ROPAL Implementation Committee and Deputy EC Chair in charge of operation, Dr. Eric Bossman Asare.
ROPAA is a law passed by Parliament in 2006 that seeks to provide an opportunity for Ghanaians living abroad to participate in the nation’s General Elections; but since its passage some 13 years ago, not much had been seen from the EC to give full effect to the law until the famous High Court ruling of December 2017, which gave it fresh impetus. These consultative engagements will see the team spend the next 5 days in the selected African countries.
