By Pascal Kafu Abotsi ([email protected]) The Progressive People’s Party (PPP) is convinced that the Electoral Commission’s engagement in legal battles with some of the disqualified political parties is a deliberate move to divert the country’s attention to the courts so it can have a field’s day. Addressing the press in Accra last week, Director […]
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By Pascal Kafu Abotsi
The Progressive People’s Party (PPP) is convinced that the Electoral Commission’s engagement in legal battles with some of the disqualified political parties is a deliberate move to divert the country’s attention to the courts so it can have a field’s day.
Addressing the press in Accra last week, Director of Policy of the PPP, Mr. Kofi Asamoah Siaw, posited that the strategy was intended to take the focus of journalists to the courts, so activities of the electoral body would go unchecked.
Touting that the PPP had been the target of the EC, he indicated that: “the EC wants to use us as pawns in a game of chess…so they go to the Supreme Court to divert everybody’s attention and they will succeed in diverting the attention of journalists and when journalists are there, the whole nation goes there.”
Dr Papa Kwesi Nduom’s PPP was one of the 13 political parties disqualified by the Electoral Commission about a month ago.
The party did not make it onto the EC’s list because one Richard Antwi Aseda, with voter identification number 7812003957 endorsed the nomination forms of the PPP both in the columns for the Central and Volta Regions, using two different signatures, an act that contradicts the laws governing elections in Ghana.
The PPP turned to the courts with the argument that the party was not given the opportunity to make amendments, as prescribed by the electoral laws of the country.
The High Court, presided by Justice Eric Kyei Baffour, ruled in favour of the PPP and directed that the party be allowed to make corrections to the form.
The EC failed to honour that directive and instead, ran to the Supreme Court to have the high court decision quashed.
And this, Mr Asamoah explained, was craftily done to ensure there was limited time left after the courts had handled the cases involving the disqualified candidates, which would reflect an impossibility for journalists and political parties to scrutinise the undertakings of the Electoral Commission, since everything would be hastily prepared.
“Journalists would have then lost focus of what the electoral processes are, who is printing the ballot papers, how many companies are involved in the printing, how many ballots they are printing, the number of ballots being printed for each region, when the National Collation Centre will be established and so on,” he hinted.
Since the processes would go unquestioned, the Policy Director alleged, “They rush the printing…so they ship one million ballot papers to the Volta Region. You have no time to see or scrutinise it. And they ship another 5 million to the Northern region and another 3 million to the Upper West. How will you know?”
Mr Asamoah, thus revealed that the PPP’s suspicion is that the whole affair “is a deliberate scheme designed by the state with the help of the EC to make sure we have limited time to run the election, rush things through so that someone continues to be in power.”
The National Chairman of the party, Nii Allotey Brew Hammond said he was surprised the EC was not interested in the use of dialogue to solve the administrative challenges majority of the parties faced.
He emphasised that the decision by the EC to file a writ at the Supreme Court to have the ruling by the High Court quashed, “confirms our belief at this point that these shameful manoeuvrings are orchestrated by our opponents who are uncomfortable with th
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