Mohammed Bashiru
The New Patriotic Party (NPP) in the Anyaa-Sowutuom Constituency of the Greater Accra Region has accused the opposition NDC of deliberately trying to delay the declaration of results in the area “for reasons best known to them”.
Officials of the Electoral Commission were on the verge of completing and declaring the ballots cast across the 295 poling stations in the area when officials of the NDC began to raise issues with some of the declaration of polls form popularly referred to as pink sheets.
The officials who included former Attorney General, Marietta Brew Oppong, demanded that the collation process be restarted.
They threatened not to sign the final result if this was not done.
This, however, did not go down well with the NPP officials who maintained that the various party agents of the NDC had signed the various pink sheets that the executives were complaining about.
Mohammed Bashiru, Constituency Secretary of the NPP had suggested that since both parties had the pink sheets, it would do no harm if the EC went ahead to declare the results at the collation centre.
He said the NDC could cross check the figures later and raise their concerns if any.
This led to a back and forth between the two parties as well as the EC officials.
But a compromise was eventually reached and the EC officials began going through the results one polling station after the other.
But somewhere along the line they suggested that they be given an hour to go through the result and sort out the issues if any so they can go ahead and declare the result since they are working with time.
This again led to another misunderstanding between the parties.
The NDC after a moment then agreed that they would also need another one hour to go through the final results presented by the EC officials.
This led the NPP officials to blame the NDC of deliberately trying to delay the process.
At the time of filing this report, officials of the NDC are cross checking the figures that they have while the EC officials are also going through their collation.
By Gibril Abdul Razak