By Margaret Jackson
March 18, 2013
It seems somebody from the Eastern terrain of Africa is learning from Ghana. But that man who is known as Raila Odinga, the Prime Minister of Kenya did not adopt the dirty tactics as exhibited by Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, the two-time defeated presidential candidate, when he lost the presidential bid.
Raila Odinga appealed to the Supreme Court of Kenya over the past weekend. We did not hear or see Odinga turn out his supporters to cause mayhem by brutalizing innocent individuals who have nothing to do with his electoral loss. We are also yet to hear that supporters of Odinga have killed any innocent citizen of Kenya as part of his bitter loss.
The classy act by Raila Odinga clearly separates him from Nana Akufo-Addo who almost turned the country upside down following his bitter loss but for the level headedness exhibited by the Ghana National Peace Council, the Security Services and restraints by members of the National Democratic Congress (NDC).
For the records, Raila Odinga lost the presidential election to Uhuru Kenyatta by 43.28% to 50.07%, with Kenyatta avoiding a run-off by only 8,100 votes. But Odinga did not cause any pandemonium on the very people he had aspired to rule as exhibited by Nana Akufo-Addo. I hope you have not so soon forgotten about the stabbing to death of some NDC supporters and the destruction of properties belonging to some media houses by supporters of Akufo-Addo.
Akufo-Addo, who is also in court challenging the presidential electoral victory of President John Mahama, has done something which will take generations unborn to either repeat or beat. Nana Akufo-Addo, is perhaps the only known politician or person in the universe to have seized the electoral results of all the polling stations that he contested during the 2012 Presidential Election, and gone through all of them trying to determine every single vote that was cast in his favour or that of his opponents.
Never in the history of democratic elections have we seen or heard of any candidate going to that extreme. And to make matters even worse, Nana Akufo-Addo even has the audacity to tell the Supreme Court where to deduct and award votes to each of the presidential candidates.
But the strangest behaviour by Akufo-Addo which many Ghanaians are not aware of is that out of the 26,002 polling stations that he scaled through, he did not find any fault with even a single polling station that he Akufo-Addo won. All the so-called problems that Akufo-Addo found in the 11,916 polling stations were all from polling stations won by President Mahama. Is this due diligence or selective justice?
It is good that the pieces concerning the bogus case by Akufo-Addo are beginning to settle and we all pray that the Supreme Court determines the case in the shortest practicable terms in order for Ghanaians to go on with their business. I wish that the NPP supporters know the true facts about the case or they will go behind what they have been told by the NPP leadership to learn more about the pink results sheets and what the Electoral Commission (EC) laws are all about.
I have stated countless of times that two questions on the pink results sheet looks similar thereby confusing some of the presiding officers of the EC. And this is what Akufo-Addo has jumped on to trumpet falsely that there was either over voting or more voting numbers added to what President Mahama actually got.
The questions on C1 (What is the number of ballots issued to voters on the polling station register) and C3 (What is the number of ballots issued to voters verified by the use of Form 1C) seems to have confused many presiding officers who repeated the same numbers on both C1 and C3, leading Akufo-Addo to cry foul where there seems to be nothing.
If Akufo-Addo wants fair play or wants to be commended as a true democrat he would not be selective in what he did. Akufo-Addo only called to question the simple mistakes by the presiding officers in polling stations that he lost, but kept mute on the same simple mistakes in polling stations that he won.
Nevertheless, these simple mistakes did not affect the overall results declared because the details of votes won by every presidential candidate on Section E of the pink results sheet are the overall kingpin of the election. If the total numbers captured for every presidential candidate on Section E is more than the total number of ballot sheets issued at those polling stations, that is when everybody will agree with Akufo-Addo that there was indeed some uncanny acts perpetrated at those polling stations.
Unless Akufo-Addo is trying to play mischief or ignorant, it would be extremely difficult for him to convince anybody who is privy to details on the pink results sheet that he has been cheated. Ghana will be a better place to live if people of Akufo-Addo’s traits are kept from the limelight.
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