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Foreigners from neighbouring countries have acquired Ghanaian voter’s identity cards in order to avoid paying bribes to border officials to cross to Ghana, Samia Nkrumah has alleged.

According to her, a number of those who registered in the just ended Limited Voter’s Registration exercise by the Electoral Commission in the Jomoro Constituency in the Western Region confirmed they were not Ghanaians.

Samia who is seeking to recapture the Jomoro parliamentary seat on the ticket of the Convention People’s Party (CPP) claimed the local citizens told her scores of people who were bussed to the various centres to register were “unknown in the area”.

“We also stopped to speak to some of these obvious visitors and many confirmed that they were not from Ghana.

“They explained that their sole interest was to acquire Ghanaian Voter’s ID to use to avoid paying bribes when crossing the borders and to have access to other opportunities within our borders,” Samia claimed.

She said at the various communities, she saw groups of people arriving in minibuses escorted by some political party functionaries, claiming the parliamentary candidate of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the New Patriotic Party (NPP) in the constituency are complicit in the bussing of the foreigners.

“The figures from the communities of residence of the NDC and NPP parliamentary candidates, namely Nawulley and Tikobo No.1 respectively, as well as the border town of Elubo, recorded the highest numbers of registrants,” she said, but did not provide figures to support the claim.

She said the only time some of these foreigners were prevented from registering was when the residents supported the polling agents who objected to the foreign applicants.

In some cases however, she claimed the community people joined forces with the NDC and NPP people to bulldoze Electoral Commission (EC) officials to get the foreigners registered, noting this was particularly prevalent in the strongholds of the NPP and the NDC candidates.

She further alleged some army and police vehicles as well as personnel were deployed to those communities in an apparent move to quell any tension from the residents when the population suddenly shot up.