Posted on: www.dailyguideghana.com
By William Yaw Owusu
Monday December 31, 2012.
Details are emerging of the petition filed by the
opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) at the Supreme Court to challenge the declaration of
John Dramani Mahama as President-elect after the December 7 and 8 general
elections, amidst drama.
The document has NPP presidential candidate Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, his running
mate Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia and NPP Chairman Jake Otanka Obetsebi-Lamptey as the
petitioners.
President
John Dramani Mahama, in his personal capacity as presidential candidate of the
National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the Electoral Commission (EC), the body
that supervised the December general elections have been cited as respondents
in the suit.
The
Petitioners are praying that the highest court of the land to declare that
“John Dramani Mahama was not validly elected president of the Republic of
Ghana.”
They also want the court to declare that “Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, the 1st Petitioner herein, rather was validly elected President of the Republic of Ghana,” as well as “Consequential orders as to this court may deem fit.”
Drama
But
the filing of the court process at the Supreme Court which ordinarily could
have been done by a law clerk, it took three lawyers to do the filing to make
sure that everything was in order.
Even
before the three lawyers, Kwaku Asirifi, Godfred Yeboah Dame and Egbert
Faibille, Jnr got to the court national security operatives were all over the
place and the lawyers had to devise means to outwit them.
They
also had to trick the media who had besieged the court premises by setting
decoy for them to follow while they sneaked to the Registry to file the
process.
Fearing
that some unknown persons might want to snatch the documents from them, they
had to make four copies so that in the unexpected event of a commotion at the
court then other copies would be relied on.
NDC
Presence
The drama was further deepened when in the court’s
registry Victor Kojoga Adawudu, a member of the NDC’s legal team stormed the
room and insisted on witnessing the process being filed by the NPP lawyers.
Mr Adawudu had claimed that he was at the registry
as an ‘interested party’ but the NPP lawyers requested that he left the room
before they could complete the process.
After a few minutes of heated argument, he left
the room reluctantly. The scene was captured on video now circulating.
When journalists enquired from him why he entered
the office he said “I went in because my party NDC will definitely be an
interested party. I wanted to see what the process was or what was going on.”
NPP Grounds
The
grounds on which the NPP are basing their case are that “there
were diverse and flagrant violation of the statutory provision and regulation
governing the conduct of the election which substantially and materially
affected the results of the elections as declared by the Electoral Commission
on December 9, 2012.”
The NPP claimed that the EC permitted voting to
take place in many polling stations without prior biometric verification by the
presiding officers of the election or their assistants contrary to regulation
30(2) of CI 75.
They said the irregularities were deliberate, well calculated and executed between John Mahama and the EC, leading to illegal votes of 1,342,845.
The petitioners averred that “at the conclusion of
the election, the 2nd Respondent herein, acting through its
Chairman, Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, who was at all material times the Returning
Officer for the December 2012 presidential elections, returned John Dramani
Mahama, the 1st Respondent herein, as having been validly elected
president of the Republic of Ghana.”
“Thereafter on 11th December 2012, the
Declaration of President-Elect Instrument, 2012 (C. I. 80) was published under
the hand of Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, the Chairman of the 2nd Respondent.”
STL
& Strong Room
According
to the petitioners “prior to the December 2012 elections, 2nd
Respondent, with the aim of assuring all stakeholders of the transparency and
integrity of the process by which it received declaration of voting results
from the constituencies, invited, on different occasions, regional executives
of registered political parties to the ‘Strong Room’ of the 2nd
Respondent, where such results were received; and it was further explained to
them that all the results would all be received through the faxes installed in
the ‘Strong Room’ directly from its officials from the regions or districts and
that there could be no opportunity for tampering with the results before same
were received in the ‘Strong Room’.”
Petitioners
said, “however, that on 8th December 2012, while provisional results
of ballots cast in polling stations were being declared and voting was still
underway in some polling stations, it came to the notice of some members of the
public that the offices of Superlock Technologies Limited (STL), a security
installation and Information Technology (IT) company, was receiving the results
of the elections before transmitting same to 2nd Respondent in its
‘Strong Room’.”
According
to the petitioners a team of NPP leaders, led by Yaw Osafo Maafo, went into the
premises of STL and confronted the officials of the company in the presence of
the media and police officers, whereupon the STL officials said that 2nd
Respondent was their client with whom they had an agreement to provide IT
services by, among others, receiving all results of votes cast and faxed from
the regional offices of the 2nd Respondent before transmitting same
to the ‘Strong Room’ of 2nd Respondent.
“This
encounter, including the said response of the said STL officials, was broadcast
live by the electronic media to the general public,” the petitioners averred.
The
Petitioners said “this arrangement of 2nd Respondent with STL was
made without the knowledge of either the Petitioners’ party or the Inter-Party
Advisory Committee (IPAC), to which NPP belongs and where all matters
concerning elections were discussed,” adding “This secret arrangement and
concealment provided opportunity for tampering with the results of the
elections.”
Registered Voters
According
to the petitioners some time before the December 2012 elections, the Chairman
of 2nd Respondent informed Parliament when he appeared before it
that 2nd Respondent had registered some one million (1, 000,000)
voters, who had not been assigned to any polling station, even though the
Public Elections (Registration of Voters) Regulations 2012, (C. I. 72) required
that registration of voters shall be carried out in designated polling
stations, known for that purpose as registration centres.
They
averred that after 2nd Respondent had conducted its biometric
registration exercise, announced to the public that the provisional number of
voters registered was a little less than thirteen million (13,000,000) and that
after cleaning the provisional register and verifying same, it would publish
the final number of registered voters.
Surprisingly
and contrary to legitimate expectation, when 2nd Respondent posted
the final total number of registered voters on its website, the number
inexplicably increased by over one million (1,000,000).
The
petitioners say that on or about 26th September 2012, that is some
forty-two (42) days before the presidential election scheduled for 7th
December 2012, the 2nd Respondent, acting through its Chairman,
officially announced the total number of polling stations to be employed in
conducting both the presidential and parliamentary elections in December 2012
as twenty-six thousand and two (26,002). This was ostensibly to ensure
transparency, fairness and integrity of the December 2012 presidential and
parliamentary elections, and to comply with Regulation 16 of C.I.74., which
prohibited the establishment of a new polling station within forty-two (42)
days of an election.
The Petitioners further said that the
total number of registered voters that 2nd Respondent furnished
Petitioners’ party, the NPP, was fourteen million and thirty-one thousand, six
hundred and eighty (14,031,680). Subsequently, it came to the notice of the
Petitioners that 2nd Respondent had on Sunday, 9th
December 2012, declared the total number of registered voters as 14,158,890.
Furthermore, on the same date, 2nd Respondent posted on its website
the total number of registered voters as 14,031,793 showing a clear disparity
of 127,097.
Bloated Register
The
petitioners said that “the 2nd Respondent inordinately delayed in
furnishing the Petitioners’ party (NPP) with the final voters’ register until
just a few days before the December 2012 elections, which conduct prevented the
NPP from scrutinizing the said register and thereby contributed substantially
in undermining the transparency, fairness and integrity of the December 2012
elections.”
“Although
a common register was compiled for both the presidential and parliamentary
elections, it turned out, from the results declared by the 2nd
Respondent, that the total number of registered voters in respect of the
presidential elections exceeded that of the registered voters for the
parliamentary elections by one hundred and twenty-seven thousand, two hundred
and ten (127,210) voters.”
According
to the petitioners, they will contend that “the total number of registered
voters ought to be the same for both the presidential and parliamentary
elections and further that there could not lawfully be different total
registered voters for the presidential and parliamentary elections.”
The petitioners say that the EC recorded that
President Mahama had 5,574,761 representing 50.70 percent while Nana Akufo-Addo
had 5,248,896, representing 47.74.
“Petitioners
say the invisible sleight of hand, which transmogrified the total number of
registered voters from fourteen million and thirty-one thousand six hundred and
eighty (14,031,680) as provided to the NPP by the 2nd Respondent to
fourteen million one hundred and fifty-eight thousand eight hundred and ninety
(14,158,890) remains completely inexplicable to date,” they averred.
No comments:
Post a Comment