Feature Article, by Nana Akyea Mensah, The Odikro.

Is it not simply amazing that the NPP continues to make the sort of public comments they make about their case before the court, knowing very well they would not be allowed to go unchallenged? The problem that this sort of behaviour raises is that is seeks to run a parallel trial in the media to the one being sought at the Supreme Court. To that extent, it would be expedient for the NPP not to run their mouths publicly about this case and expect a timid public response. This article is an example of the sort of robust public reaction the NPP must continue to expect from some of us who want to keep our democracy clean from fraudsters and mathematically challenged pretenders to the throne, and disturbers of the peace. I am specifically referring to the statement by the Communications Director of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Nana Akomea, to the XYZ News that they have presented the court with “solid documentary evidence to back each of the claims that we are making”. [1] This was uncalled-for. The Ghanaian public certainly does not need that sort of information in that media, as the right forum for such utterances is before the Justices of the Supreme Court, and not ABC or XYZ News!

In fact, some of us see in this ridiculous performance, a rather cynical and subtle attempt to prepare the minds of the public to reject the Supreme Court decision, once it goes against them. This is why they should not be ignored. This is why it is important to expose the disinformation campaign embarked upon by the NPP regarding their patently bogus and transparently fraudulent claims of having been cheated in an election that independent observers cry in a tremendous unison, including the Ghanaian media, as free and fair and representing the will of the people of Ghana. In “Why Akufo-Addo Will Not Concede Defeat”, written just after the vote, I traced the roots from his records since the 2008 vote and came to a firm conclusion, that Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo was not going to accept defeat no matter what. And that the decision not to concede defeat took precedence over the facts, put the cart in front of the horse, and expected the cart to pull the horse!

The decision to contest the results was taken even before they embarked upon desperately seeking whatever evidence that was there to lay hands on. It is a little bit like George Bush's excuse to go to war against Iraq under the pretext that Saddam Hussein had produced “weapons of mass destruction” and the wild goose chase that ensued! In Nana Akufo-Addo's case, it is obvious from Gabby Otchere-Darko's article, “Vigilance Is The Motto For December 7”, Feature Article of Saturday, 1 December 2012, published one week before the vote, that the issue of refusing to concede was foremost on their agenda. They were ready to reject the results “at all cost” once the “wrong” candidate emerged as the winner! The rejoinder I wrote to counter that article has been hailed by many as being very insightful, but it was one of the easiest of predictions. It became easily predictable after reading Otchere-Darko's article. That is why I wrote the following in my own feature article published on the 3rd of December, 2012, in “Akufo Addo Prepares Not To Concede Defeat!” [2]:

“I smelt a rat as soon as I read the latest article by the Executive Director of the The Danquah Institute. I almost called this article, “Danquah Institute Concedes Akufo-Addo's Impending Defeat!” Now, why would the Executive Director of the Danquah Institute, deem it fit to devote a complete lie to an article surreptitiously on vigilance? Why would he write a thing like this “Unlike Nana Akufo-Addo, John Mahama has no track record of adopting the gentlemanly course of gracefully accepting defeat after losing an election, simply because he has never tasted defeat at the highest level of political competition where the stakes are most high“? One thing is clear: they have a plan. What is not clear is the nature of the plan. From the way he dwelt so much on violence, it has to be something to do with violence. Difficult to tell who is pulling that off, but a losing candidate who has clearly come out to say that he wants to be in power “at all cost”, whose right-hand man is sanctimoniously complaining against political violence in a feature article that ominously portends that the Akufo-Addo camp are one-step ahead of the Ghanaian electorate. The plan is simple. In the event that Nana Akufo-Addo is rejected by Ghanaians, he is not going to accept defeat.”

Judging from the strange silence that greeted the calls on Akufo-Addo to explain the circumstances under which he left Oxford University in 1962, the rejection of the “Free SHS Education for all”, as a 419, the ethnocentric insults of Ewes as “Trokosi” and “Northerners” as “Cattle Rearers”, it would have been a miracle for the NPP to have come out as a winner! The senseless threats to peace, such as “all die be die” put off many peace-loving voters. Those of us who have been expecting both the defeat of Nana Akufo-Addo at the just-ended elections, as well as his inevitable knee-jerk reaction of refusal to concede, are therefore not surprised at the ridiculous manner they have been gleaning the grounds for excuses to support their ill-fated decision to challenge the electoral results. We are lucky that the 21 day limit was inserted into the Constitution, otherwise, the NPP would still be busy looking for the evidence they fondly call “incontrovertible”, even before they are found! Just as a drowning person does not discriminate between the quality of straws that come his way to clutch on with his life, the NPP is bound to display their straws as they go down, as “evidence”!

Out of curiosity, I just checked the meaning of “clutch at straws” to see how close they are, and you would think the writers of the dictionary had the NPP in mind! The phrase, “clutch at straws” denotes, “Fig. to continue to seek solutions, ideas, or hopes that are insubstantial. When you talk of cashing in quick on your inventions, you are just clutching at straws. That is not a real solution to the problem. You are just clutching at straws”. The McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs, also has: “1. to try any method, even those that are not likely to succeed, because you are in such a bad situation (usually in continuous tenses) He's hoping that this new treatment will help him but I think he's clutching at straws. 2. to try to find reasons to feel hopeful about a situation when there is no real cause for hope (usually in continuous tenses) She thinks he might still be interested because he calls her now and then but I think she's clutching at straws.”

Thus the correct English to write about the current posturings of the NPP leadership, ought to be “the NPP is clutching at straws!” After crying foul that the Electoral Commission did not wait enough for them to most probably place an injunction on the declaration of results that were ready, and throw our democracy into total confusion, it emerged that some of the “evidence” they provided to the Electoral Commission were so frivolous that the Electoral Commission had no choice other than to dismiss them. One would have expected some refinement after such effort at weeding off bogus cases from their petition. But it only got worse. In the first place there is a problem with the basic arithmetic of the NPP petition. As you can see in this comment I received by mail, calculated almost the minute the NPP came out with their figures. The result is stunning!

The NPP gives the following figures which form the basis of their grand total of 1, 340, 018 gargantuan electoral fraud for which they seek remedial action: 1. Over voting alone accounted for is 620,443, 2. Voting without verification is also 456, 9333. Figures that did not match accounted is also 3, 841. The total of 620, 443 + 456, 933 + 3, 841 = TOTAL: 1, 081, 217 but NOT 1, 340, 018. - WT, “Poor arithmetic by NPP team”, Dec 28, 2012, 14-55 GMT. It is therefore not surprising that that the NPP even commits more grievous errors as to make the petition itself, vexatious and abuse of Judiciary procedure. A friend of Professor J. Atsu Amegashie who goes by the initials “WT”, wrote, according to the NPP, “The irregularities led to 1,340,018 votes being wrongly counted as part of the result of the 2012 presidential election. These votes were largely to the benefit of the NDC presidential candidate.” The 1,340,018 illegal votes above were obtained by summing votes in the following categories:

(a) OVER VOTE DUE TO TOTAL VOTE EXCEEDING BALLOT PAPERS ISSUED TO VOTERS
(b) VOTING WITHOUT BIOMETRIC VERIFICATION
(c) SAME SERIAL NUMBERS FOR DIFFERENT POLLING STATIONS
(d) MISSING PRESIDING OFFICER'S SIGNATURE ON REDSHEET
(e) WORDS AND FIGURES DO NOT MATCH

This is the most important passage in the entire article: “Please note that someone who voted without biometric verification is likely to have voted with a ballot paper. Polling stations without the presiding officer's signature may have involved no biometric verification, a mismatch between words and figures, etc. This means that the five categories above are not necessarily non-overlapping categories. Therefore, adding the votes in these categories as the NPP did is double counting or multiple counting and leads to an inflation of the alleged number of illegal votes.” This effectively buttresses what Mr. Asiedu Nketia said earlier on: “We don’t have a problem with whatever they are talking about in terms of the numbers on the register but our problem is for them to assume that they by their won reckoning have seen that there is a bloated register so therefore all the bloating converts into votes that have been added to the tallying of President Mahama and I think that is where we come back to what I have said all along that the NPP has problem with logic and they have problem with mathematics.”

The General Secretary of the NDC, Mr. Johnson Asiedu Nketia on Sunday, December 9, 2012, rightly announced in a press conference that the party was awaiting the declaration of election results by the Electoral Commission (EC), in spite of allegations by the New Patriotic Party (NPP) of electoral fraud. The NPP had requested that the EC delay the declaration of results until an investigation is conducted into the allegations. Mr Asiedu Nketia said all credible political parties collate results and that the NDC’s collations correspond with the results that the EC has released so far. He added in a barely veiled jab at the NPP that “parties who struggle with mathematics should not visit the effects of their incompetence on the nation.” [3] “If you have a problem with maths don't visit it on us”!

This is what every right-thinking Ghanaian needs to be telling the NPP. The scenarios projected by the Executive Director of the Danquah Institute, Mr Otchere-Darko, in the event of they not being satisfied by the results include, the undoing of “all of this progress we have made as a nation.” Sir John was reported to have said, in the wake of the beating of journalists by NPP supported, and “all die be die” incitements from the NPP leadership, and the fear of an inevitable police crackdown, “If they make the wrong move by arresting any of our officers, they will know no peace and this country will suffer for that", Sir John said adding “we are not scared to be arrested but if they try to arrest any of us we will make this country ungovernable.” [4] What the NPP needs to know is that an overwhelming majority of Ghanaians want this nation to continue to be governable, and the beating of innocent civilians going about their normal life, such as journalists, shall never be tolerated. Rather than deceiving themselves they are above the law, the NPP must rather think of withdrawing the “all die be die”, if they want their own party to be governable!

At their press conference calling on the Electoral Commission to suspend its intended declaration of the presidential results and conduct an audit of the collated figures as well as the counts from the biometric verification machines before the electoral results were finally released, the Chairman of the NPP, Mr Jake Otanka Obetsebi-Lamptey, was reported as saying, “For example, Peace FM and Joy FM have both announced 10,000 more votes for John Mahama, the NDC Presidential Candidates, than what was declared for him at the Ledzokuku collation centre, giving him 63,210 (60.53 per cent), instead of 53,210”, he alleged and stressed that such systematic manipulation of the figures across the country casts serious doubt on the credibility of the results. It has since been revealed by Mr Fifi Kwetey, Deputy Minister for Finance and newly elected Member of Parliament for Ketu-South Constituency, who was also present at the EC Strong Room, that when the issue came up, what exactly transpired, as he described claims being made by the New Patriotic Party (NPP) against the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) that the 2012 General Election was rigged in favour of President Mahama as fraud.

Speaking on Radio Gold’s Gold Power Drive, Friday, Fifi Kwetey said the attempt by the NPP to provide evidence to the so called allegation is an effort to swindle Ghanaians. “You see these guys have absolutely nothing. The whole evidence they are working on is nothing but another 419 just like their Free SHS had been 419 and Azaa,” he said. According to him, in the strong room of the Electoral Commission (EC) on Sunday 9th December, the National Chairman of the NPP, Jake Otanka Obetsebi-Lamptey, confronted the Chairman of the Electoral Commission, Afari Gyan, challenging him to withhold declaring the results of the election claiming he had original results which defy those the Electoral Commission received from the various collation centres.

However, Fifi noted that “when the Electoral Commissioner withdrew to examine those results, they realized that, a lot of it was absolutely incomplete. Some of it they were mixing parliamentary figures with presidential figures” He also indicated that the NPP claimed for example that the returning officer announced 67,710 votes in favour of the NDC instead of 53, 710 in the Ledzokuku Constituency in the Greater Accra Region. However when the EC cross-checked the figures it turned out to be false because the true figure recorded was 53,710 votes for the NDC! [5] Interestingly enough, they have quietly left out their initial objections in the case. No one hears of Ledzokuku, any more. The NPP has also remained silent over the negative implications of an independent and scientifically verifiable data by CODEO's Parallel Voting Tabulation which is consistent with the results as declared by the Electoral Commission.

The NPP is now embarrassingly silent over the “Ledzokuku scandal”, as they churn out similar rubbish to replace the discredited ones! They are the ones fooling themselves. Ghana shall move on, with or without them. Nana Akomea, the Communications Director of the NPP, can spare us the yarns that they have presented the court with “solid documentary evidence to back each of the claims that we are making”. The NPP cannot prove before the Supreme Court that 1+1=3, or 4 or perhaps, in this case, a whopping 1,340,018! The major obstacle facing the NPP is not the law, the conduct of the elections, the availability of “solid documentary evidence” but a simple struggle with additions and subtractions. The evidence as presented, is mathematically nonsensical, legally untenable, and politically vexatious. There is nothing out there that can substantiate a mathematically impossible proposition, except probably in quantum physics, where both candidates can be winners and losers at the same time. Such a scenario however, is more likely in a university lab, than we are likely to see at the Supreme Court!
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Nana Akyea Mensah, Ghana Steering Committee,
P-AI, Social Media Campaigns | January 2, 2013
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REFERENCES:
[1] NPP has presented solid documentary evidence - Akomea | General News 2012-12-31 http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/artikel.php?ID=260886:
[2] Akufo Addo Prepares Not To Concede Defeat! Feature Article 2012-12-03 , by Nana Akyea Mensah, http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/artikel.php?ID=258250&comment=8591103#com
[3] If you have a problem with maths don't visit it on us, Asiedu Nketia replies NPP | Myjoyonline.com | Adam Reese | Published On: December 9, 2012, 15:50 GMT Politics http://politics.myjoyonline.com/pages/news/201212/98457.php
[4] We will make Ghana ungovernable - NPP | General News 2012-12-12 http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/artikel.php?ID=259215&comment=0#com
[5] NPP's Gathering Of Electoral Evidence Is Another 419 Like Free SHS- Fiifi Kwetey | General News 2012-12-15 http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/artikel.php?ID=259579