Akufo-Addo is pursuing a fictitious presidency - Tsatsu

The governing party’s lead counsel has accused the main opposition party of pursuing “a fictitious presidency”, through its legal challenge of the 2012 presidential results.

Tsatsu Tsikata, while cross-examining key witness, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia for the sixth day running said: “You see, the unfortunate thing is that you want your continuing errors of analysis to be the basis of a fictitious presidency, that is what you want, that is what you are asking this court [for]”.

Mr. Tsikata’s comment was a riposte to a comment by Dr. Bawumia, who while answering questions in court on Wednesday May 8, 2013, sought to rebuff a suggestion that his party’s petition was hinged on an error-riddled analysis.

Dr. Bawumia, who is the second petitioner, unfurled the retort to diffuse an impression created by Mr. Tsikata that, just like the Electoral Commission’s purported transposition and administrative errors in recording the election results, he Dr. Bawumia had made errors in his petition to the court.

The brief banter over errors was sparked by persistent attempts by Mr. Tsikata to get Dr. Bawumia to admit as errors, rather than deliberate acts or omissions of rigging, certain numerical discrepancies identified by the petitioners as evidence of over-voting in the 2012 presidential poll.

Mr. Tsikata said: “…Even in your petition, you made an arithmetical error”, but Dr. Bawumia responded saying: “But my errors didn’t affect somebody’s presidency”.

Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo together with Dr Mahamudu Bawumia and the party’s National Chairman Jake Obetsebi-Lamptey is in court challenging the validity of the election results as declared by the country’s Electoral Commission after the December 7 and 8 general elections.

The Respondents are President John Mahama, the Electoral Commission and the NDC.

The petitioners argue that the elections were fraught with unpardonable flaws, which must not be left uninvestigated.

They accuse the NDC of conspiring with the Electoral Commission, to deny Nana Akufo Addo victory in the polls.

They, therefore, are praying the Court to set aside and nullify the EC’s results, which declared President Mahama as the winner of the presidential poll.

They want the court to annul 4,670,504 of the valid votes cast during the election at 11,138 polling stations where they claim a lot of anomalies occurred.