Correspondence from Eastern Region

The social distancing protocol appears to be a non-factor in the first day of the voter registration exercise at Mile 50 M/A Basic School, Koforidua, in the New Juaben South Municipality.

Even though the exercise is going on very smoothly and peacefully, and the handwashing aspect of the COVID-19 prevention protocol was being adhered to, social distancing has however been thrown to the dogs.

Applicants could be seen sitting and standing closely together without considering the two-meter distancing rule.

When GhanaWeb visited the registration centre, quite a lot of the applicants were also seen wearing their nose masks but even that, most of them had their masks shifted under their chins and only on their mouths.

At about 3:30 pm, the Eastern Regional Minister, Eric Kwakye Darfour, bumped in at the registration centre as part of his tour to some of the centres in the region.

He had to prompt some of the applicants in queue to wear their masks properly so they would not put others in danger.

At that time, each of the centres clustered at the Mile 50 M/A basic school had registered not less than 70 applicants.

One of the applicants who had successfully registered and gotten his card, Nana Kay, expressed satisfaction about the registration process to GhanaWeb.

"It's less than 10 minutes, within five minutes you are done; supposing the network is good. So here at Mile 50 primary school, the network is good so within 10 minutes you are done," he stressed.

Nana Kay, however, suggested that the lamination kind of ID card cannot stand the test of time especially when water pours on it and therefore called that the ATM type of card should have been done.

The Eastern Regional Minister also expressed contentment in the registration processes at the various centres he visited so far.