By Margaret Jackson
June 3, 2013
There is something which is emerging which should give every Ghanaian who wants this Supreme Court (SC) petition case to end soon and on a positive note serious cause for concern. Even though the NPP have observers who have been witnessing the counting of the pink sheets by the KPMG as directed by the SC, the NPP folks want the count to be done on their terms.
This attitude by the NPP is frustrating the KPMG which is bent on completing the count in a way that would be fair to all the parties involved whilst maintaining their integrity and neutrality.
At the heart of the issue is the inability of KPMG to reach NPP’s magic number of 11,842 pink sheets which they claimed they submitted to the SC with their affidavits. In fact, when KPMG did the count of pink sheets lodged at the offices of the SC Registrar the number ballooned from the supposed 11,842 to a whopping 13,928, thus raising a lot of eyebrows.
This huge variance between the supposed number of pink sheets submitted by the NPP as against the number so far counted by the KPMG, has generated a lot of buzz and suspicions because prior to the counting of the pink sheets, the respondents claimed that 8 additional boxes of exhibits mysteriously found their way to the offices of the SC Registrar.
Therefore, to ascertain which party is telling the truth in this pink sheets saga, something else needed to be done to put the issue to bed. But whilst the respondents are of the view that the pink sheets at the offices of the president of the panel sitting on the case should be counted because the parties agreed that it should serve as the control check, the NPP think otherwise.
It is however important to note that the feet dragging behaviour of the NPP even compelled the Head of KPMG Africa to fly down from South Africa to Accra to help resolve the impasse. During the meeting between the KPMG officials and the parties involved in the case, the KPMG Head stressed that since the number of pink sheets counted is different from the number of pink sheets submitted by the NPP, the only way the issue could be resolved is for the control pink sheets to be counted.
The respondents totally agreed with the KPMG on this, stressing that by counting the control pink sheets, it will let the whole world know which party is speaking the truth. In fact the respondents were of the view that if the control pink sheets are counted and the number ties with that of the NPP or the respondents, the whole world will then know which party is speaking the truth.
This did not however go down well with the NPP who threatened last week Thursday to pull out of the pink sheets counting. But the Head of KPMG reminded the NPP that if they pull out, the counting will still go on since they were there as observers. It was at this point that the NPP realized that if they go ahead with their threat to pull out of the counting, they will look very bad in the eyes of Ghanaians.
Therefore, a resolution was reached that all the parties would meet on Monday June 3 to craft the way forward in the counting of the control pink sheets and possibly that of other justices of the SC who also received the same exhibits.
But the NPP came to the table on Monday June 3 with a letter stuck in their armpit claiming that they will not go with the counting of the control pink sheets since it did not form part of the direction given to KPMG by the SC. The NPP further claimed that since the SC asked KPMG to count the pink sheets at the offices of the Registrar, KPMG does not have the mandate to go beyond that, and that the pink sheets at the Registrar’s office should be the only pink sheets to be counted.
This sudden backtracking by the NPP is sending the parties back to the SC to receive further directions on the way forward. In fact, it is going to delay KPMG from completing its work on time. One is wondering why NPP is resorting to this delaying tactics if they have nothing to hide.
If the NPP are right in their claim that they did indeed send 11,842 pink sheets to the court, why would they prevent the counting of other exhibits to confirm their claim? The only reason which can come to your mind is that, the NPP may be preventing the counting of the control pink sheets because their numbers do not add up and that is why they are doing everything to prevent the truth from coming out.
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