David Asante at the press conference yesterday
Leadership of the Let My Vote Count Alliance (LMVCA), a group of young men from various political parties in country have expressed grave concern about the continuous delay in the ongoing election petition before the Supreme Court.
They claimed lawyers for the respondents in the case were deliberately pushing for what they referred to as ‘technicalities card’ to delay the entire process.
“Our genuine fear that the new strategy chosen by the respondents in the full glare of the public stands a very strong evil chance of sacrificing justice and therefore the pillars upon which our peace has been delicately built,” spokesman for the group David Asante, stated at a press conference in Accra yesterday.
This strategy, according to him, was intended to “reduce this important election petition to be determined not by the substance of the thousands of evidence which the petitioners (Nana Akufo-Addo, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia and Jake Obetsebi-Lamptey) have brought for adjudication but the form by which those exhibits of evidence were filed and or served on the respondents”.
“And this is what we believe is a dangerous precedent to be insisting on in this crucial case of our lifetime,” he emphasized.
Frustration
Apart from that, the leadership of the LMVCA said “what even worries us most is the appearance of the blessing of the court even as the respondents pursue this agenda of theirs” insisting that “the court has given the respondents too much room with which they are beginning to stifle the entire process.”
In view of this, they said “it is very frustrating even for those of us watching the proceedings on TV as the respondents hold the judges of the highest court and 25million Ghanaians to ransom as they insist on not disclosing the quantity of pink sheets served them by bailiffs from the registry and yet will not allow their witnesses to answer questions on pink sheets they claim have not been served.”
As a result, Mr Asante claimed “petitioners are helpless and even the Justices appear to be helpless because they appear to the people to be failing to stamp their authority on this deliberate negative strategy” and that “the recent developments in the court are sending the wrong signals that the court option as a resolution to electoral disputes may be a waste of time and resources. We do not wish Ghana to also travel the hard road that our East African neighbours did.”
“It is a path that none of us should pray or wish for and that is why we are drawing the nation’s attention to it,” he stated while noting with emphasis that “Ghanaians are simply not prepared to see the interest of substantive justice giving way to technicalities.”
This, he said was because “the people would not allow the justice that they seek to be denied through the frivolous and vexatious instruments of technicalities like exhibit numbers whether they begin with four zeros or no zeros at all; whether the exhibit number takes us to a polling station in Techiman or Kpandai” insisting that “this case is about what happened at polling stations across the country on December 7 and 8, 2012 and nothing less.”
Leadership of the LMVCA has consequently asked Justices of the Supreme Court in whose bosom the fate of this case rests to stamp their authority and stop what they described as “this puppetry of technicalities orchestrated through the joint enterprise of lawyers for John Mahama and the NDC, using the lawyer for the Commission as the convenient, ever-willing instrument of such blatant, unpatriotic evil”.
By Charles Takyi-Boadu