Reports emanating from some of the registration centres of the ongoing national identification exercise indicate that many of the registration clerks or officers are using the exercise to exploit Ghanaians.
And although they [registration clerks] have been verbally cautioned by the Executive Director of the National Identification Authority -NIA, Dr William Ahiadze, TODAY’s underground scouting at some of the centres in Accra revealed that many of the registration clerks are still taking bribes ranging between GH¢5-GH¢10 to register people who are not willing to join the long queues at various locations.
Some of the centres where the practice was very much rife, the paper established, include Russia, Abeka, Fadama, Official Town and many other suburbs in the Greater Accra region where the third phase of the exercise has started.
Other areas like Russia Last Stop, our team of reporters who posed as residents to be registered, discovered that many of the well-to-do people in the area did not waste time at all in registering because they greased the palms of the superintending officers.
The paper also found out that previous registration exercises in Accra were fraught with similar fraudulent practices. These areas are Kwabenya, Dome, Achimota, Kissieman, West Legon and some more areas in the Dome Kwabenya and Okaikoi North Constituencies of the Greater Accra region.
They simply would have to drive and park their posh cars near the registration centres and put undisclosed amount of monies in envelopes and give them to the registration clerks who immediately would disregard the long queues and attend to their donors and register them.
On Saturday, 16th January, 2010, at Russia a brawl ensued between the registration clerks and some residents who felt the officers were giving preferential treatment to the wealthy in the area.
The incident became uncontrollable when some of the residents who had been queuing for hours realised that the registration clerks were registering people who were willing to pay bribes.
But for the timely intervention of some other elderly residents in the area, the situation would have resulted in the lynching of the registration clerks and those offering bribes.
At Official Town in the Ablekuma sub-metro and Fadama in the Okaikwei sub-metro, the paper discovered that the registration clerks in these districts openly collected bribes from anybody who wanted to be served early.
The practice, got many who had queued for long hours infuriated, with many of them threatening to boycott the entire exercise. According to them, they could not fathom why registration clerks were serving people who were not in the queue.
It was also established in our news hounding that many of the registration clerks reported late. That, coupled with the sometimes shortage of registration materials, TODAY learnt was not helping the smooth execution of the NIA exercise.
In some instances, some of the residents reported that the registration clerks arrive around 8:00 a.m., and start the exercise at 9: 00 p.m.
“In the wake of the late start what irritates some of us is that latest by 3:00 p.m., they will tell us that the day’s exercise has come to an end, and will therefore pack their things and leave,” a resident of Abeka Lapaz furiously lamented.
Madam Araba Mensah, a resident who had lived in Official Town for almost 20 years had this to say: “We are really disappointed in the registration and the registration clerks. The situation where they are taking money from some of us before they register is very bad and must be stopped immediately.”
Alhaji Fuseini Yaro, a resident of Fadama, told TODAY that if nothing is done to check the “corrupt registration clerks in my area, Ghana will wake up one of these days to hear that the area has been turned into a bloodbath.”