Ask Margaret Jackson

April 22, 2013

If you have been keenly following the on-going Supreme Court (SC) case on the 2012 electoral dispute, one thing has started emerging which puts a serious dent on the petitioner’s case. That issue is becoming abundantly clear and it’s going hard against Bawumia and co.

The NPP, championed by its past vice presidential candidate, Dr Mahamadu Bawumia, has stated that through some painstaking investigations conducted by a committee which he headed, have found over 11,000 pink results sheets corrupted or with questionable data.

Under cross-examination, Mr Tony Lithur, the counsel representing the first respondent, President John Mahama, made Bawumia admit on oath that there was not a single pink results sheet that was duplicated in his analysis to buttress the petition before the court. This is an oath which will be extremely difficult to recant.

But for the second time since Bawumia was put under cross-examination he has been forced to painfully admit that there were several hundreds of pink results sheets that they submitted that were duplicated. Bawumia, who may be thinking that being in the dock can be equated to academic exercise has however been repeating his one liner after admitting to dupes that, “Again, I can assure you that in our analysis we did not use the numbers on the pink results sheets twice”.

The question that many people are beginning to ask is, if Bawumia and co. did not have any intention to double count in their compilation and analysis of the results, why would they in the first place make double copies of the pink results sheet? It simply does not make sense to make dupes of pink results sheets if you do not have any intention of using them twice or for double counting.

From the way things are going, if Tony Lithur is able to establish before the court that many of the pink results sheets were double counted it immediately weakens the case for Bawumia and co. and simply puts a big dent on their credibility and the case. There may even be criminal acts awaiting Bawumia and co. if the SC determines that they duplicated the pink results sheets to deceive the justices.

Another issue that raises a lot of questions concerns the signatures on the pink results sheets. Tony Lithur has raised an alarm on some of them. The signatures on the pink results sheets are supposed to be the same. What the EC has must be the same thing that all the parties have.

Therefore, if the NDC is raising an alarm that the signatures they have on some of the pink results sheets are different as compared to what the NPP has, then we have a problem. Again, Tony Lithur may have cross-checked the signatures of the results sheets the NDC has with that of the EC to confirm that they were the same. That is why he is raising red herring on what the NPP tendered in evidence.

These are serious issues which bring to mind many nagging questions. Will it be right to jump the gun and state that the NPP double printed the results sheets and labelled them differently to deceive the judges or the NDC?

Tony Lithur put it bluntly on Monday April 22 during his cross examination of Bawumia that but for the double counting purposes the pink results sheets presented by Bawumia and co. did not add up to the over 11,000 that he wanted the judges to believe.

We all live to see how this case trends because it is looking like the NPP did not do due diligence on their evidence and rushed to court. Even the number of pink results sheets submitted to the SC is suddenly under contention with the NDC claiming that they are lower than 11,000 but a little over 8,600.

magjackson80@yahoo.com http://majjacks80.blogspot.com