NDC Lawyers are Disingenuous

Feature Article of Saturday, 20 April 2013

Columnist: Bonsu, Akua

When a man knows or is expected to know about an issue, but willfully makes assertions that are wrong, he is categorized as a liar and disingenuous if such lying is motivated. Ato Dadzie, one of the lead NDC lawyers on the Supreme Court petition case, once wrote to his colleagues in the NDC that they must implement some diabolic tactics to embarrass Nana Akufo-Addo during the latter’s listening tour because “we have nothing to show for in the 2012 elections.” That lack of substance and disingenuous behavior is again at play here in the election petition case.

In public Ato Dadzie and his cohorts of a legal team have posited that they cannot wait to legally disprove the NPP’s election petition. But privately they have done nothing but scout for ways to either delay the process, or score cheap political points in a shameless hope that the public might be swayed on a virtual open-and-shut case. The ploy that these NDC lawyers engaged in during their cross-examination of Dr. Bawumia was clearly designed for the public because they themselves know that it has no bearing on the legal course of the petition.

During cross-examination, the NDC lawyers tried to establish that Dr. Bawumia’s evidence is fraught with double counting because certain pink sheets appeared twice or multiple times. For the lay person, this is a huge point, and the NDC’s team of liars is now drumming this point in across the country. But that is how you know that the defense is on a hot seat.

Here is the truth. The evidence was submitted in categories with a stack representing over-voting, a stack representing voting without bio-metric verification, and so on. So if in one polling station there was over-voting as well as voting without bio-metric verification, that polling station will be included in both stacks of evidentiary purposes only. But it is up to the Justices to determine whether or not the numbers from that one polling station have been counted more than once. The NPP insists that they were not. So why is this all of a sudden the undoing of the NPP case?

Let us make this very simple with this analogy. How many people attended the beach party? 100. How many attendees ate food at the party? 60. How many attendees drank alcohol? 70. How many attendees danced? 95. The NDC is trying to insinuate that the NPP is claiming that 225 people attended the beach party, but NPP insists that only 100 people attended the party. Intelligent people will understand that one person can eat, drink alcohol, and dance at the same party and not be counted as three. Of course the NDC lawyers are having a hard time understanding this simple mathematics. And they know their followers agree with them. And by the way; these are the people making decisions on behalf of our dear country.