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The NPP’s intentions exposed: No
genuine desire for electoral reforms!!
By Dr. Michael J.K. Bokor
Sunday, July 28, 2013
My good friends, as we wait for the addresses to be delivered by
the counsel for the petitioners and the respondents,
respectively, we should continue to examine issues with the view
to preparing our minds for what they will say in summing up
their arguments.
We all have a stake in the matter and should not detach
ourselves from it. After all, we have been monitoring
developments and know how the tide flows. We are capable of
scrutinizing issues and should do so, even if we rely on the 9
Supreme Court judges to end it all.
The main argument raised by the petitioners and their supporters
is that the petition is good because it will lead to electoral
reforms. I refute that porous argument because there is nothing
to support it. Nowhere in the various versions of the NPP’s
petition is anything said to that effect. Everything is centred
on the demand for reliefs based on the annulment of over 4
million votes and Akufo-Addo declared as winner of the 2012
Presidential elections. Whom are these NPP people trying to
deceive but themselves?
They don’t even want the Supreme Court to examine the integrity
of Election 2012? If they do, why will they not extend their
scrutiny of the pink sheets to all the 26,000 polling stations
but limit their work to 24,000 and come out with slightly over
11,000 as their benchmark for alleging irregularities? And the
KPMG has even rubbished their exhibits, reducing the number to
slightly over 8,000?
Here is how someone has put it:
If the petitioners truly want the court to evaluate the
integrity of the 2012 Presidential elections and arrive at a
just conclusion without prejudice to any party, it is incumbent
on them—in the interest of fairness and equity—to subject the
whole of the 24,000 pink sheets to the same scrutiny as they
accorded the 11,000 that they tendered as evidence.
Whether coincidentally or by design (which is more likely),
those 11,000 pink sheets pleaded as their “water-tight evidence”
were selected from the constituencies won by the first
respondent (President Mahama).
By excluding more than half of the total polling stations in the
country, and without including any pink sheets from the
constituencies won by the first petitioner (Akufo-Addo), it is
impossible for the Supreme Court to arrive at a correct
decision, using a limited number of pink sheets as evidence.
In admitting that errors occurred, all that Dr. Bawumia kept
saying was that it was an error but it shouldn't affect
someone's presidency. He admitted the errors detected in the
pink sheet exhibits but insisted on explaining that even though
there were duplications, triplications, and quadruplications, he
used only one pink sheet for his analysis.
Everything he said was tied to this “analysis” as if the Court
cares about his self-opinionated understanding of the issues at
stake. Indeed, Bawumia doesn’t know that the Court is interested
in nothing but irrefutable evidence, which in this case will be
expected to be based nowhere else but on what happened at the
elections.
Unfortunately for him and his co-petitioners, he continued to
admit that the pink sheet exhibits were fraught with anomalies,
mislabellings, duplications, triplications, and quadruplications.
Is this what will win the minds of the judges?
And why did they choose only the Presidential elections to
contest when the general elections were two-fold—Presidential
and Parliamentary—and the processes integrated?
Now, to another aspect involving the transpositional errors on
the pink sheets, apparently because some Presiding Officers
failed to sign the pink sheets or made transpositional/clerical
errors in recording figures.
Do we even know the political affiliation of the Presiding
Officers whose errors the petitioners are capitalizing on? Could
they be the internal collaborators who had been induced to
commit such errors to be taken as the basis for this petition?
(a question that I asked in response to a comment made by a
contributor to an earlier discussion thread).
I asked this question because it underlies the storm that the
NPP petitioners have set in a tea cup, which they are begging
the Supreme Court to settle in their favour.
We are aware of the admissions made by Dr. Afari Gyan that the
EC faced serious challenges in conducting Election 2012, one of
which was about technical glitches (concerning equipment), which
was solved and enabled the elections to be held over two days
(December 7 and 8)—the first in the country’s politico-electoral
history.
Another major problem was human-based, regarding the calibre of
people recruited by the EC to handle tasks on Election Day. Most
of these recruits were appointed as Presiding Officers to
oversee the elections. They were regarded as non-permanent
(unofficial) staff of the EC but vested with as much power as
the country’s Constitution provides or the EC’s own regulations
stipulate.
Dr. Afari Gyan said that as usual, the majority of these
unofficial staff were teachers who were recruited from all over
the country and given some basic training to know the do’s and
don’t’s of the electoral process.
Some workshops were organized all over the period to help them
sharpen their skills for the D-day. Obviously, training these
officials couldn’t be all-inclusive. Thus, some foibles and
frailties couldn’t be eradicated.
Although the EC has always insisted that those eligible for
recruitment as non-official EC staff (Presiding Officers)
shouldn’t be known activists or followers of any political
party, no one could confirm that those selected for Election
2012 were depoliticized.
The EC might have caused an initial vetting to be done and some
unofficial, casual investigation done into the background of the
prospective recruits before their being accepted to function as
such. But who won’t know that each of those unofficial staff
members definitely has a political persuasion to defer to, even
if suppressed for purposes of doing the EC’s work and earning
some income thereby.
At this point, the suspicion is that all those who worked as
Presiding Officers voted for specific political candidates
(Presidential and Parliamentary) in consonance with their
political convictions. So, as political beings, they have their
political interests to safeguard.
Now, to the main issue. With this background information, it
will be dangerously ridiculous for anybody to say that the
Presiding Officers had no political interest at stake. They had
one and still do.
Here is why I want to stick my neck out to say that the
technicality of non-signing of pink sheets and anomalies in
entries being raised by the petitioners to support their stance
against President Mahama and the EC could be a well-crafted act
of treachery or sabotage by Presiding Officers compromised by
the petitioners even before the final results of the elections
were announced by Dr. Afari Gyan.
Otherwise, why did they not sign the pink sheets as required by
law? Why did they mess up the entries to create doubts about
them? Mere oversight or deliberate mischief to support a
premeditated move by their handlers to challenge the outcome of
the Presidential elections?
Knowing very well how the pendulum of opinion polls and the
reception given them before the elections swung against them—and
a constant premonition that they would lose the
elections—couldn’t the NPP people have surreptitiously
compromised the Presiding Officers at polling stations whose
pink sheets are in contention to commit those errors in the pink
sheets for them to capitalize on? My hunch!!
In this sense, shouldn’t these Presiding Officers have been
summonsed by the Supreme Court for evidence to be gathered from
them so that we could all know the truth behind those clerical
errors?
I can tell from the pitiable confidence that the petitioners
have placed in those technicalities that they know how a
premeditated error in the pink sheets can work to sustain their
protests. It is the usual treachery that no one who knows how
desperation can drive politicians crazy should overlook. But it
will lead them nowhere but a dead-end, which I expect to detect
in the address to be delivered on July 31 by their lead counsel,
Philip Addison.
Clearly, it is a contest between REALITY (what exactly happened
on Election Day as recorded in the votes cast and announced as
the true reflection of the voters' will) and TECHNICALITIES (the
use of transpositional/clerical errors on pink sheets by people
desperately seeking political power through the back door).
The REALITY will definitely displace the TECHNICALITIES because
those represented by that REALITY are wide awake and won't sit
down unconcerned for the manipulators hiding behind the
TECHNICALITIES to prevail at the Supreme Court.
No genuine desire for reforming the electoral process will
produce this kind of petition. Clearly what the NPP petitioners
are pursuing is a self-serving one, which is so haphazardly and
treacherously skewed as to betray their desperation and morbid
desire for political power through the back door. Such a desire
won’t materialize because it is sinister. And the petitioners
and their benighted followers will be told the truth very soon.
I shall return… * E-mail: mjbokor@yahoo.com
* Join me on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/mjkbokor
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