<<Print>>

This is the last in a three part series on the events in the Presidential Election Petition Hearings as observed by the writer. The first two parts dealt with events before the substantive case started and the testimony of Dr. Bawumia in the witness box. May 23rd � The GENERAL So after Dr. Bawumia came, the General Secretary of the NDC, Johnson Asiedu Nketiah, very affectionately called �General Mosquito�, the supreme identifier of idiots who in the end applied and begged the Supreme Court with his Party to be allowed to join the fray of idiots. He was in the box. And with him came a novel way of election administration, the �Chooboi model�, where he informed the nation excitedly about how presiding officers threw the rules, laws and guidelines to the dogs, preferring rather to follow the orders of chooboi taunting supporters who cared little for process. For him, all Dr. Bawumia said was theory, guidelines of what should have been but not what actually happened. Also, for this well experienced election expert, who according to him in the witness box and a crosscheck of the facts available, might have been the only polling agent during the 1978 UNIGOV referendum, there was nothing like a second definition of over voting and he did not know where Dr. Bawumia and the petitioners got their definition from. Over voting, according to him, was only when the number of ballots in the box after voting was more than the registered voters. As long as the number registered was not breached, who cares about the numbers on the register who might have died or who for various reasons failed to turn up on Election Day? Who cares? But he did confirm the law and agreement on no verification no vote and was in no disagreement on that. Indeed, a tape of an interview he granted to Citi fm played in court proved that he held more extreme views on the consequences of allowing people to vote without verification, to him. �Such people should be in jail�, he charged. He also confirmed that the Presiding officer�s signature was very important and ought to be on the pink sheet before a declaration of the results is done. But for him, even though some officers failed to do this, there was nothing wrong because the signatures of the polling agents were as good as that of the presiding officer. In the logic of Mr. Nketiah, my will or a cheque I have issued can be deemed to be valid even without my signature as long as there are the signatures of some witnesses. Not to forget, a certain Philip Addison got the experienced mosquito to admit his lack of experience with regard to biometrically run elections. May 30 � GO TO COURT IS IN COURT May 30th began as a normal day but it wasn�t long before a very powerful image was telecast to the nation of curious minds. The petitioners, 1st and 3rd respondents had closed their case and now it was time for the Electoral Commission, 2nd respondents to open their case by calling their witness. Till that morning, there had been a lot of doubt about who the Electoral Commission would call; many thought it would be Sulley Amadu, who till then had deposed to every single affidavit but many hoped that is should be Dr. Kwadwo Afari Gyan and yes, he was the one who took the box. The almighty Afari Gyan, had hurled workers at his tilapia pond to police cells weeks earlier for having emptied his pond of large populations of the tilapia fraternity in it, a pond he had tirelessly worked on. But in court that day, the matter was not about his missing or fugitive tilapia; the matter was about the election he had organized on December 7th, the declaration he had made on December 9th and truly, his 20 year record as Ghana�s Electoral Commissioner. And oh, what a morning it was. We were thrilled. We were held spellbound as Dr. Afari Gyan began his testimony by outlining his unparalleled record as the greatest Elections administrator with a black skin. He slowly, and in a very detailed fashion laid bare the work he had done in administering elections and supervising some all over the globe, from Papua New Guinea through Cuba to even war-torn Somalia. There was nowhere he hadn�t been. His brush of election effectiveness had touched every continent. And on that Thursday, he confirmed that indeed FO voters were known by the biometric machine as Dr. Bawumia had stated. He confirmed that biometric verification was compulsory for each and everyone who voted. He also confirmed and expanded the frontiers of the case by saying that failure to fill in the sections of the pink sheet at the times specified was an irregularity. In the other days of being led in evidence and being cross examined by the partners of the EC, the NDC and counsel for John Mahama, Dr. Afari Gyan also noted the unimportance of whatever the petitioners called serial numbers on the pink sheets. At some points he even stated that he didn�t know what the serial numbers were and that they had just been placed there by printers who had decided to decorate the pink sheets with various numbers. And yes, the General was right. There was only one form of over voting, the �classical� definition; whatever definitions the petitioners had brought was unknown to the world renowned administrator and the court had to treat it as such. 6th June � OVER VOTING FINALLY But on the 6th of June with seconds to go for the court to rise, a question on one of the pink sheets with over voting was launched at Dr. Afari Gyan and in a surprising turn of events, it was bingo for the petitioners. The messiah of election administration finally admitted the second definition of the petitioners on over voting. In the course of his cross examination, that was not the only issues he admitted though. He was made to admit the various duplications in the list of 705 foreign registrations the EC conducted; he admitted that 905 and more pink sheets were unsigned by the presiding officers after having admitted that the presiding officer�s signature was very important. He admitted that Blank was same as zero and shut a lot of NDC empty propagandists up who had hitherto claimed the exact position as had been stated by Dr. Bawumia was totally wrong. Strangely, he also introduced a new provision in the C.I. 75. This was the �Omanhene Act� which provided that Chiefs and popular persons could defy laws and that there was nothing wrong with allowing such persons to vote without verification. According to Dr. Afari Gyan, he would have allowed all Chiefs, popular persons such as assembly men, musicians, actors and actresses and prominent persons in society to vote without a blink of the eye and without being verified by the biometric device if he was a Presiding officer on December 7. He admitted also finally that serial numbers on the pink sheets ought to have been unique, had the EC not miraculously printed two sets of the pink sheets and that indeed the EC was the body that mandated the printers to add the serial numbers. However, he really could not explain why the two sets were printed. He initially said that it was because the EC did not know how many candidates were going to contest the election but then it was pointed out to him that unless he was a magician or some sort of prophet and spiritual guru who could see into the future, that justification could not be true because the pink sheets came with exactly the order of the candidates as was found on the ballot paper; the order determined after the candidates had balloted in late October. As such, he knew perfectly the number of candidates at the time the pink sheet was printed. But we cannot forget the other days. The days when our experienced electoral commissioner was shown to know very little about our electoral process; he did not know how the voters� ID card was generated, he did not know what the form 1B used in registration was, he did not know what a micro chip was, he did not know how the biometric verification device on which the taxpayer had spent millions of Ghana cedis on at his order was, he did not know the device had a self test mode, he did not know that there were duplicates in his voters� register till it was pointed out to him, he did not even know in which country the pink sheets, which was the primary record of the elections, were printed and he did not know what a PDF was.