The Director of Elections of the National Democratic Congress, Mr Elvis Afriyie Ankrah, has called on the Ghana Police Service to rise up to their duty of enforcing the rule of law and protecting citizens’ rights during the on-going voter registration exercise or be faced with a situation where NDC members are forced to defend themselves.

This, he said, is due to sustained NPP government-led thuggery against members and followers of the NDC across the country.

At the NDC’s weekly Press-Briefing held at the party’s national headquarters in Accra on Wednesday, the former Sports Minister presented pictorial and video evidence of life-changing injuries sustained by NDC members at the hands of organised NPP thugs.

According to him, these thugs operated under the protection of the government and often with the connivance of government officials who usually accompanied them. He decried the incidence of known NPP thugs wearing formal military and police uniforms who, in some cases, are armed.

He declared, “we are very law-abiding people, we will not attack anybody. So far, we have cautioned our people to collaborate and cooperate with the security agencies…. the regular police and maybe the military appear not to be able to deal with these things.

“We are sending a note of caution. We are peace-loving people. We want to cooperate and collaborate with the police. They should deal with these incidents. If these incidents continue, as long as we ask our people to go and register, if they continue we will tell them to defend themselves.”

He called on the government to live up to its persistently broken promise to ban vigilantism by stopping the increasing spate of violence being reported, particularly against the NDC’s officials and activists, not only at the registration centres but also in NDC strongholds.