The New Patriotic Party’s (NPP) intention to send to the Supreme Court an amended writ of the original concerning the number of polling stations which recorded anomalies has been described as a strategy to delay the case in court.
A member of President John Mahama’s legal team, Dr. Dominic Ayine in an interview on Eyewitness News on Thursday opined that the NPP’s latest move “is one hell of a strategy that is meant to let this matter drag on for as long as possible because I believe that the NPP do not have a case; the petitioners do not have a case in court.”
The petitioners of the NPP seeking to challenge the 2012 presidential election results which they earlier stated that there were anomalies identified in 4,000 polling stations across the country. However they are now seeking to amend the earlier writ on the basis that after careful scrutiny, they have realized 7,000 more polling stations experienced similar anomalies thereby increasing the number to 11,000.
However, Dr. Ayine stated that if the NPP had a case, they would have supplied the President’s legal team with the detailed particulars they had asked the court for rather than “bringing an application to amend right now.”
According to him, the petitioners should not have filed their petition “the way it was filed in the first place. Then they had arithmetic errors and grammatical errors, there was everything wrong with the petition as it was filed and in the middle of it, we are asking you to supply further and better particulars and all you can do is bring an application that you want to amend in order to take care of 11,000 polling stations.”
He expressed the hope that when the amended petition is brought in, it will provide them with the factual basis of the level of irregularities that the petitioners are alleging took place in the 11,000 polling stations.
In response, a Deputy Communications Director of the NPP, Yaw Buaben Asamoah mentioned that Dr. Ayine does not have a full understanding of the petitioner’s case.
According to him, the NPP has no intention of dragging a case in which they are expectant of an early and positive conclusion and insisted that the petitioners have the right to amend their petition if other relevant finds are made with their investigations.
“The petitioner is consistently researching those pink sheets. In no legal process in the world are you not allowed to amend your case and make it better for the court to decide more efficiently and more expeditiously.”
Source: Citifmonline
