GOMPA, Nimba – Princeton Monbia, a local official of the National Election Commission in upper Nimba, has told reporters that there will be a replacement of some voter registration staff.

He said the decision was made based on his own assessment conducted in certain areas following a series of complaints from the public that some voter registration staff members were too incompetent to do their job, some allegedly lacking the ability to spell common names like ‘Mary’ or ‘Nimba.’

“Oh yes, we have decided to take on this exercise, because some people that were recruited and assigned by the [electoral supervising agents] are not really doing fine,” Monbia said. Monbia expects recruited staff for the voter registration process, especially clerks, to be up to the challenge.

This declaration from Monbia contradicts comments he made earlier, claiming that all workers were doing fine and completing their assigned duties as planned and that there had not been any complaints reaching him about their competence.

“I have not gotten any complaints from the field, except school authorities saying that we should not use their campuses,” he said in earlier statements. “But we are coming tomorrow to appeal to them to allow us to use their campuses. Everything is going on fine. Today – and the first day of every exercise – is very tough, so if the people took some time today to go to their various centers, I know they have all adjusted themselves to that. We anticipated that because some of them were facing some problems [at] their centers.”

“Actually, when it comes to the recruitment, we [the local NEC office in the county] recruit the ESA,” Monbia said. “My office trained the ESAs, then we sent the ESAs out to recruit and train the [voter registration] staff. But we are somehow disappointed that some of the ESAs chose people who are not competent for the job.”

Monbia said that many of the staff were chosen based on their relationships as friends and family members of the ESAs. He said qualified and competent people who had initially applied were denied the opportunity due to this nepotism.

“We have the rightful people that we trained, but instead of placing them there, they replaced them with other people – perhaps relatives, friends or so.” He asserted. “There are people who are not competent to do the job and they are there doing the job. They are not up to the task…some ESAs are responsible for this.”

According to Monbia, his office has replaced over twenty workers so far and this number is expected to rise should the situation call for it.

“What I am telling you, there are some who are serving as clerks who cannot spell at all. This is very, very discouraging, so we are getting them out to put the rightful people there who will do the work,” he said. “I dropped one lady yesterday. The lady could not spell even ‘Patricia,’ and so I dropped her.”

Featured photo by Arrington Ballah