Thursday,
August 22, 2013
My
good friends, it is exactly one week to Judgement Day when the Supreme Court
will announce its verdict regarding the petition that Akufo-Addo, Dr. Bawumiah,
and Jake Obetsebi-Lamptey filed against President Mahama and the Electoral
Commission on the outcome of the Presidential Elections on December 7 and 8,
2012.
From
now till that moment, I will articulate my convictions and explain them to justify why I am
persuaded that the NPP petitioners will lose the case. I don’t intend to hijack
the assignment from the 9 Supreme Court judges, but I want to articulate my
viewpoints for discussion in readiness for the moment.
Ours is to share ideas and enlighten each other
so that we won’t be misled by anybody. All this talk of peace must be
reinforced with cogent analysis of issues to clear any fog in people’s minds.
My goal is to unpack the issues and to suggest
that anybody who rejects the Supreme Court’s verdict and resorts to hooliganism
and riotous acts to destabilize the state should be given the stiffest
punishment ever imaginable.
So, here is my conviction: Having analyzed the
petition and scrutinized proceedings at the Supreme Court, I am convinced that
President Mahama will be retained in office.
Why am I so convinced?
1. The general elections were not characterized
by any act that undermined voting, counting and certification of votes and
declaration of winners at each polling station. No polling agent of any
political party lodged any formal report in protest against any fraud at any
polling station.
2. The votes were counted, certified, and
announced in the open at each polling station for the public to know who won or
lost and the quantum of votes. The general public vigilantly participated in
everything and knew the results at each polling station long before the
clerical work concerning pink sheets was done.
3. The results announced at each polling
station were forwarded through the appropriate channels to the Electoral
Commission headquarters, where each political party or independent Presidential
candidate had agents monitoring events. The agents appended their signatures to
the official declaration of the results by Dr. Afari Gyan. None protested at
the outcome of Election 2012.
4. Elections were monitored by local and
foreign observers whose conclusion put it as free, fair, transparent, and an emulable
example for other African countries.
5. The petitioners’ recourse to pink sheets to
fight their case is in bad faith as the exhibits themselves proved during
proceedings—inconsistencies, anomalies, miscategorizations, duplications,
inglorious skewing of pink sheets to exclude the NPP’s strongholds, and many
more. In effect, the main substance with which the petitioners fought their
case is doubtful in form, nature, scope, content, and volume, not to mention
value.
6. No direct evidence was adduced by the
petitioners at any polling station to prove that malpractices or irregularities
occurred during and after voting to warrant their challenging the results.
Many more reasons; but I will settle on these
to begin the series on Countdown to Judgement Day.
I expect the Supreme Court to concentrate
attention on what actually happened at the polls and not the administrative or
document handling aspect. The voting that took place yielded results that were
announced in the open. Why should anybody turn to pink sheets to contest that
outcome as if the pink sheets matter more than the actual votes that were cast,
collected/collated, counted, and declared in the open as the primary material
on which the fate of the candidates was determined at Election 2012.
In subsequent parts of the series, I will raise
other perspectives. Friends, what are your own convictions?
I shall return…
·
E-mail:
mjbokor@yahoo.com
·
Join
me on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/mjkbokor
No comments:
Post a Comment