Election Petition: Is Philip Addison doing “Try and Error” in Court?

I have asked the above question several times as I watched the live broadcast of the election petition going on at the Supreme Court. It looks to me as if either Philip Addison doesn’t know why the NPP is in court or he doesn’t really know what the 9 Judges of the Supreme Court are looking for in the case before them. At one point in the case, Philip Addison used the word “irrelevant.” He used it to describe a question Tsatsu Tsikata asked Dr. Bawumia. Lawyer Tsikata wanted to know from Dr. Bawumia whether he was aware that the Communications Director of Nana Akuffo Addo’s campaign team was on air declaring Nana as the winner of the 2012 Presidential elections whilst the elections was still on-going? Philip Addison stood on objection and told the court that if Tsatsu Tsikata has no further questions to ask, he should stop cross-examining Dr. Bamumia instead of asking ” irrelevant” questions. That was when Justice Atuguba told him to leave the “relevance” of a question to the court, and that so far as they were concerned; the question was relevant to the case. Philip Addison’s objection was overruled by all the 9 judges.

Now, when Philip Addison requested a soft copy of the report from KPMG, Tony Lithur raised an objection to it, stating that the parties had already agreed with KPMG that no one, except KPMG would have the soft copy. In response to Tony Lithur’s objection, Philip Addison described the objection as “strange.” When I listened to Philip Addison forcefully describing Lawyer Lithur objection as “strange,” I thought Lawyer Addison was the 10th Judge or he knew what he was talking about. At the end of the day, the Judges by a 7-2 ruling, made Addison to know that Lithur’s objection was not after all “strange.” Philip Addison is doing try and error in court by using adjectives to describe certain happenings to see if one of them would stick. He has no clue what is going on in court and what the judges are looking for.

The seriousness with which Addison fought for the soft copy of the KPMG report suggested to me that the NPP’s numbers don’t add up. I don’t know what the actual number is, but I can now say with confidence and authority that the NPP does not have 11,842 pink sheets. They have either 11,840 (short) or 11,845 (more). Their figures don’t simply add up. The next few days are going to be interesting because I want to see how the NPP is going to defend their bogus arithmetics. The NPP has Lawyers and Doctors who don’t know how to add 1 and 2 and 3 etc.

The NPP is accusing the Electoral Commission of irregularities, omission and errors during the 2012 elections, yet they could not even arrange pink sheets that had already been put together. They are asking the Electoral Commissioner to tell the court which countries they ordered the pink sheets from. Philip Addison made it look as if ordering pink sheets from a certain country favored a particular candidate. Come on, let’s all reason together. Does Philip Addison want the Supreme Court to tell or suggest to the Electoral Commission to order pink sheets from certain countries so that all the candidates would be on the same level? Has ordering of pink sheets from certain countries become illegal in Ghana? I didn’t know that.

From the way the election petition is going on at the Supreme Court, it is becoming evidently clear that no matter what the final verdict would be, the NPP would not agree with the Supreme Court. They started casting doubts on the Electoral Commissioner some few weeks before the 2012 elections and that has landed them in the Supreme Court.

Instead of the NPP presenting themselves as the vibrant alternative to the NDC during the campaign period, all they did was to come up song after song singing free senior high school education and Nana is a winner. Now instead of the NPP coming up with a clear case (if they have any) why they are at the Supreme Court, they are defining questions as “irrelevant” and describing objections as “strange” When they loose this court case, they will either run to the International Court of Justice or they will embark on series of demonstrations against the Supreme Court. If I am a member or sympathizer of the NPP, I would at this time in the case, begin to question my legal team if they really know why they are in court or whether they know what the Judges are looking for. This question is “relevant” because each passing day brings enough evidence that they don’t.

Lawrence Appiah-Osei

NDC USA Financial Secretary

Appiah65@Hotmail.com