By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

When a felon with an expired legal-practice license is hired by the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), itself a party fraught with operatives of questionable character, this is what we, as a nation, get - a suave criminal attempt to taint solid forensic evidence submitted and certified to be intact by the Registrar of the august Supreme Court of Ghana (See "NPP Accuses NDC of Meeting KPMG Secretly Over Pink-Sheet Auditing" Radioxyzonline.com/Ghanaweb.com 5/21/13).

What is scandalously intriguing about the audited overage of the so-called pink sheets, the smoking-gun in the Akufo-Addo/NPP petition vehemently challenging the political legitimacy of President John Dramani Mahama, is that Justice William Atuguba and his panel of jurists hearing the New Patriotic Party petition ought not to have allowed Mr. Tsatsu "The Thief" Tsikata to take them on a wild-goose chase. As already stated, time without number, the 11,842 pink sheets had been tendered in evidence and duly accepted as such at the beginning of proceedings by the Atuguba-presided Supreme Court. If Mr. Tsikata had any objections, that was the time to have duly raised the same, being that the respondents had earlier on been supplied with copies of the aforesaid forensic evidence.

Consequently, demanding a re-count of the pink sheets two long weeks into judicial proceedings, on the part of Mr. Tsikata, was rudely akin to second-guessing the Atuguba Court. In plain English, it was tantamount to a gross exhibition of contempt for the Atuguba Court; and the presiding judge ought to have been bold and nimble enough to have called the attention of counsel for the third respondent to this flagrant fact and promptly cautioned the characteristically rambunctious Mr. Tsikata to, literally, stay in his lane, as it were.

Instead, Justice Atuguba clearly appears hell-bent on scapegoating Mr. Philip Addison, counsel for the petitioners, as the judicial "Bete Noir." This unseemly attitude of Justice Atuguba's ought not to be allowed to pass by unremarked.

At any rate, going into his obviously mischievous and collusive demand for a re-counting/auditing of the pink sheets, Mr. Tsikata had categorically insisted in open court that the petitioners had submitted something in the ballpark of 8,000 pink sheets, and not the 11,842 pink sheets that Mr. Addison and Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia had submitted to the Atuguba Court and had officially and openly been acknowledged as such.

Now, we are being rather quizzically informed that the KPMG auditing of the pink sheets has, indeed, resulted in the total number of pink sheets shooting up to the quite suspicious overage of 13,900 - in other words, at least 2,058 more pink sheets over and above the original figure of 11,842 presented to the Atuguba Court by Nana Akufo-Addo and his co-petitioners have mysteriously been added to the original pack.

Well, what the new KPMG figure indicates is that Mr. Tsikata flatly lied to the Atuguba Court when the convicted felon insisted that, in fact, the petitioners had submitted at least 3,000-plus less number of pink sheets that had officially and publicly been announced to the court. Now it turns out that, in fact, the estimated number of pink sheets given by counsel for the third respondent had been off by a whopping 5,000!

If the foregoing analysis has validity, then what this means is that somebody has added more pink sheets to the original number. Mr. Tsikata, it may be vividly recalled, in demanding KPMG auditing to be stopped, had claimed, rather laughably, that some seven more previously unaccounted for boxes of pink sheets had been added to the originally stated number of 24 boxes (actually, the latter figure was arrived at based on the number of categories of the petitioners' grievances), thus mysteriously bringing up the total number of pink-sheet boxes to 31. Now this is incontrovertibly intriguing!

In any case, impugning the integrity of the KPMG auditors, by both petitioners and respondents, does not get to the heart of the problem. More so because it was key operatives of the New Patriotic Party who, via the Atuguba Court, invited KPMG to do the auditing with the apparently unreserved concurrence of key operatives of the National Democratic Congress. This is also not the most civilized way for the parties involved in the Akufo-Addo Revolution to register their gratitude for KPMG's quite noble decision to audit the pink sheets gratis.

Needless to say, had the globally reputed and American-headquartered accounting and auditing firm heeded my advice by charging its initially reported auditing fee of at least $100,000 (One-Hundred-Thousand American Dollars), we most likely would not be discussing Mr. Tsikata's all-too-predictable attempt to muddy the proverbial waters for both the Atuguba Court and the New Patriotic Party petitioners.

You see, once KPMG decided that its auditing labor was not worth a dime, it immediately opened a strategic aperture for the felonious Mr. Tsikata and his Trokosi Gang to effectively devalue the credibility of KPMG and the Atuguba Court; it also readily paved the way for the Oxbridge-schooled felon to dent the hard-earned reputation of KPMG. Now, talk of corporate social responsibility and patriotism!

Anyway, now that it has been clearly and clinically ascertained that, indeed, Messrs. Bawumia and Addison had not contemptuously and mischievously shortchanged the court in the matter of the pink sheets, the Atuguba Court ought to be poised to delivering its far-too-long-awaited decision on the Akufo-Addo/New Patriotic Party petition. That the Afari-Gyan-led Electoral Commission (EC) may well have inadvertently misled the third respondent into believing that the petitioners had, somehow, perjured themselves in the matter of the pink sheets is clearly beside the point.

The truth as to who added at least 5,000 more pink sheets to the originally certified figure of 11,842 lies somewhere between the Gbevlo-Lartey Gang of judicial arm-twisters and the "ruling" National Democratic Congress, on the one hand, and the Afari-Gyan-chaired Ghana Electoral Commission (GEC), on the other. And this is where matters ought to rest.

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
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