As the star witness for the petitioner, John Dramani Mahama, during cross examination, aspiring National National Chairman of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), Johnson Asiedu Nketia, has explained why he was unable to present the party’s collated results for the 2020 election during the election petition at the Supreme Court.
Ahead of the conference on Saturday, the NDC’s departing general secretary informed delegates in the Bono and Bono East regions that the party’s director of information technology, Osei Kwame Griffiths, who was appointed by chairman Samuel Ofosu-Ampofo, had brought an inadequate IT system for collating results.
He said that the system broke shortly after compiling results from five regions, making it impossible for the NDC to obtain the information in time to contest the Electoral Commission’s results (EC).
The NDC organized a committee with Mr. Ofosu-Ampofo as its chairman to travel the nation personally collecting pink sheets in order to enable the party to dispute the results at the Supreme Court after the Chair of the EC Jean Mensa officially announced the results.
Following that exercise, according to Mr. Nketia, he personally informed the committee that the results that had been manually compiled were inadequate to support the case in court.
He insisted that doing so would bring him into disgrace and that he was not ready to go through it.
According to Mr. Nketia, when the same results were handed to NDC lead counsel Tsatsu Tsikata, he had concerns about them and indicated he was not ready to move forward with the case with these kinds of documents.
Mr. Tsikata then proposed the plan to submit an application to compel Mrs. Jean Mensa to produce the records held by the EC; however, the court unanimously rejected the application.
He told the party’s delegates that if he is elected, things won’t take place.
However, he stated that all NDC executives are required to report to him in accordance with the organization’s charter; therefore, while he will accept some responsibility, the National Chairman should bear the brunt of it.
Asiedu Nketia’s Audio
He told the delegates that “…Joshua Akamba said at the meeting that the one tipped to be appointed Director of IT Griffiths and Dr Bawumia had some dealings and so it was not prudent to appoint him as head of IT. This was not heeded to and the appointment was done. That resulted in the kind of system he brought for collation of results which he described as robust but after collating just five regions the system crashed. That was why we couldn’t collate our results at the right to challenge the EC.
“We believed that President AKufo-Addo didn’t win the elections, even of he did, it wasn’t in the first round but where were the results from our side to challenge the EC? We decided to form a committee to do the manual collation, we sent people around to collect the pick sheets, Chairman Ofosu Ampofo said he would do the collation himself.
“When I was going to mounted the witness box, I called for the results from our people but the results they brought were not good enough for anybody to mount the witness box with, it will lead to embarrassment and so I decided not to go court with that results because they were indefensible.
“They then suggested that we should go to Lawyer Tsikata with the kind of results they brought. Lawyer Tsikata looked at the documents and returned them to us that they were not good enough and he was not prepared to proceed with the case with such evidence.
“He even thought that the EC violated the electoral laws and so the only option was to get Jean Mensa to mount the witness box to produce the information for us to proceed on that tangent. That was why when I was asked where my results were I said I didn’t bring any results. If I become the chairman of the party, these things wont happen.”
