President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has described the petition filed by former President John Dramani Mahama, challenging his declaration as President-elect in the December 7, 2020 Presidential Election, as frivolous and incurable even after the trial.
The President, in his closing address filed through his team of lawyers led by Akoto Ampaw, said the petition was decayed beyond cure and should have been dismissed from the onset without the court going on a full trial.
“This petition has been designed, built and furnished with a lazy labour of facts and evidence that seek to attack the electoral choices of the people of Ghana,” the President fired, explaining “This is because the petitioner is in court, praying for a rerun between himself and the second respondent with a claim that no candidate received more than 50 per cent of the total number of valid votes cast at the election, as provided for in Article 63(3). Yet, as shown by the petitioner’s own case, the only way the court could grant him this relief was if the court chose to completely ignore what the people voted for on December 7 and substitute that for a results scenario fabricated on two purely artificial grounds.”
Main Arguments
Arguing on the first issue set down by the court for determination as to whether the petition disclosed any cause of action, the President said he relied on the submission made in the preliminary legal objection raised against the petition and urged the court to dismiss it “in its entirety as it disclosed no reasonable cause of action.”
The President also added that the ‘woeful’ performance of the three witnesses called by Mr. Mahama while under cross-examination further strengthened their conviction that the petition should have been dismissed from the beginning.
“Indeed, we respectfully maintain our conviction expressed in the said submissions that the petition was frivolous and discloses no reasonable cause of action remains unshaken, notwithstanding the evidence led in aid of the petition,” he said, adding, “In fact, the woeful performance of petitioner’s witnesses during their respective cross- examination has further buttressed our position that the instant petition, with all due respect, ought not to have proceeded to trial.”
“Be that as it may, it has rather exposed further the malaise that afflicted the petition at the time of its filing and which has, even after the trial, clearly decayed to become incurable. We therefore, humbly pray your lordships to dismiss the petition on the basis of the submissions on the preliminary objection,” President Akufo-Addo stressed in his closing address.
The President also tackled the constitutionality of the petition which was neither challenging the validity nor the processes of the election but rather the declaration of the results by the Chairperson of the EC, Mrs. Jean Adukwei Mensa.
Futile Exercise
The President said that the current petition was nothing but an industry in futility which was seeking to overturn the electoral choices of the people of Ghana.
He insisted that although the former President claimed in his petition that none of the candidates in the election obtained more than 50% of the total valid votes, he failed to produce any evidence to that effect.
He made a case that Mr. Mahama was only before the court seeking a rerun of the election on two totally wrong grounds; assigning the entire Techiman South Constituency results to himself and calculating the percentage of the votes using the total votes cast instead of total valid votes as clearly indicated by the constitution.
Fabricated Scenario
The President insisted Mr. Mahama has “Based on (1) a hypothetical generosity of assuming every voter in Techiman South voted for the petitioner and (2) using, erroneously, total votes cast rather than valid votes cast as the foundation for determining the 50% constitutional threshold, after adding the hypothesis of Techiman South to the votes obtained by the petitioner,” to push his case.
He added that “the petitioner is simply inviting the Supreme Court to commit the supreme error of substituting the true will of the people as clearly reflected in the majority of valid votes cast, counted and declared in the 2020 Presidential Election for a phantom result based on an inconsequential error and a hypothetical scenario. An election petition is to seek to protect the true will of voters and not to attack it.”
Petition Jurisdiction
The President also challenged the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court to hear the petition which invoked its jurisdiction under Article 64(1) of the constitution, which was a special one.
He quoted a plethora of decided case in which the Supreme Court stated that whenever its special jurisdiction was being invoked, it must be circumscribed by the parameters set by the constitution.
“It is crystal clear, my lords, that the instant matter does not meet the threshold established by law for the invocation of the special jurisdiction of the court to entertain an election petition. Clearly, my lords, an election petition, properly so called, is one which in all shape and form relates to an attack on the processes for the conduct of the presidential election itself.”
President Akufo-Addo added that “In the instant matter, it is very clear on the face of the petition and indeed the evidence of Mr. Asiedu Nketia in particular that the petitioner is not in court to challenge the validity of the election but rather the case concerns the performance of the functions of the first respondent and its chairperson pertaining to the declaration of the presidential elections of December 2020, shows that the petition is not an election petition properly so called.”
“It is our further submission therefore that the instant petition properly belongs to the class of actions which can best be described as “suits challenging the declaration” rather than the validity of the election itself. A close scrutiny of the facts relied on by petitioner make this more than apparent,” he argues.
Independent Figures
He said that Mr. Mahama appeared to be making a farce of the fact that in declaring the result of the election, the Chairperson of the EC announced the wrong figure of 13,434,574 as total valid votes instead of the actual total valid votes of 13,121,111.
He stressed that this wrong figure had already been resolved during the cross- examination of Mr. Nketia and the petitioner himself had failed to provide any figures independent of what the EC announced to prove that no candidate obtained more than 50% of the total valid votes.
“It is not in dispute that a summation of the total valid votes announced by the Chairperson of first respondent as having been obtained by the 12 candidates yields a total of 13,121,111. Apart from the fact that this figure is incontrovertible, petitioner failed and/or refused to provide any contrary evidence that would establish or at least suggest that the valid votes declared for the 12 candidates were erroneous. Petitioner failed to do so in spite of the fact that all of petitioner’s witnesses admitted that their agents across all the polling stations had been furnished with carbonized copies of the results collated from the polling stations, the constituency collation centres, the regional collation centres and the national collation centre,” he said.
50% Plus Threshold
The President continued that in spite of the evasiveness of Mr. Nketia while under cross-examination, he admitted that the total number of valid votes declared by EC in his favour was more than 50% of the 13,121,111, and that the total number of valid votes cast for the respondent as a percentage of total number of valid votes cast was 51.295%, thereby meeting the constitutional threshold 63(3).
“There is no doubt my lords that petitioner has woefully failed to discharge the burden imposed on him by law to establish that if the whole of Techiman South voter population was given to petitioner, the second respondent still obtained more than 50% of the number of total valid votes cast. More importantly, my lords, as has been adequately demonstrated in these proceedings, the valid votes cast in the presidential election of 2020 is now known and indeed, if the various valid votes cast for each of the parties, the second respondent obtained more than 50% of the total number of valid votes cast and thus meets the article 63 (3) threshold,” he argued.
Vote Padding
The President also challenged the allegation of vote padding as contained in parts of the petition and witness statement of Mr. Nketia, arguing that the alleged figures, even if true, did not have any meaningful impact on the outcome of the 2020 Presidential Election.
“The fact that the alleged vote padding was not only in respect of the second respondent but also the petitioner; and finally that should these alleged padded votes be established as actual padded votes, their exclusion from the total number of valid votes cast in favour of the second respondent did not affect the result of the declaration as was made by the chairperson of first respondent on December 9, 20.
“Petitioner and PW1 (Mr. Nketia) have no proof of the alleged vote padding beyond their say so. This is because the impugned additional votes attributed to both parties could very well have been a result of arithmetical errors in the summation of votes in the affected constituency,” he said.