Nketia says he’ll streamline things; there are agents still holding on to pink sheets because of money – Dafeamekpor

South Dayi Member of Parliament Rockson Nelson Dafeamekpor has said that the National Democratic Congress (NDC) will not implode following comments by leading members of the party including National Chair aspirant Johnson Asiedu Nketia regarding the 2020 election petition.

In his view, the party has the ability to come out of fierce contests stronger and reorganize itself.

Mr Dafeamekpor was speaking on the Election Command Centre on TV3 as part of the coverage of the NDC’s delegates conference on Saturday December 17.

Asked for his views on the revelation by the Mr Nketia that the party could not gather its results in the 2020 elections to challenge the figures of the Electoral Commission in court, Mr Dafeamekpor said “There are some polling agents who are still holding on to pink sheets because of money.

“I forwarded all my pink sheets after the 2020 elections, I was successful but some of my colleagues couldn’t do it because of teething issues.

“Asiedu Nketia was speaking to the difficulties we had on the election and thereafter and his desire that going forward things will be streamlined.”

Mr Asiedu Nketia explained what led to his inability to produce the party’s collated results in the 2020 election during the election petition at the Supreme Court when he was asked to do so during cross examination as the star witness of the petitioner, John Dramani Mahama.

The outgoing General Secretary of the NDC told delegates of the NDC in the Bono and Bono East regions ahead of Saturday’s Conference that, the IT system that was brought by the party’s Director of IT, Osei Kwame Griffiths who was appointed by Chairman Samuel Ofosu-Ampofo, for the collation of results was not good enough for the purpose.

He stated that the system crashed just after collating five regions, leading to the NDC’s inability to get the results in real time to challenge the figures of the Electoral Commission.

After the official declaration of the results by the Chair of the EC Jean Mensa, the NDC formed a committee with Mr Ofosu-Ampofo as its head, to go round the country to manually collect pink sheets to enable the party challenge the results at the Supreme Court, he explained.

After that exercise, Mr Nketia said, he personally told the committee that the results that had been collated manually were not good enough to back the case in court. Doing so, he said, was going to lead to embarrassment and that, he was not prepared to go through that situation.

When the same results were presented to lead counsel of the NDC Tsatsu Tsikata, he also raised reservations about them and said he was not prepared to proceed with the case with these kinds of documents submitted to him, Mr Nketia further revealed.

Mr Tsikata then suggested the strategy to file an application to compel Mrs Jean Mensa to produce the documents in the custody of the EC, an application which was unanimously dismissed by the court.

He assured the delegates of the party that these won’t happen if he is elected.

He however indicated that per the NDC’s constitution, all the executives report to him hence, in that sense, he will accept part of the blame but the ultimate should go to the National Chairman.

He told the delegates that “…Joshua Akamba said at the meeting that the one tipped to be appointed Director of IT Griffiths and Dr Bawumia had some dealings and so it was not prudent to appoint him as head of IT. This was not heeded to and the appointment was done. That resulted in the kind of system he brought for collation of results which he described as robust but after collating just five regions  the system crashed. That was why we couldn’t collate our results at the right to challenge the EC.

“We believed that President AKufo-Addo didn’t win the elections, even of he did, it wasn’t in the first round but where were the results from our side to challenge the EC? We decided to form a committee to do the manual collation, we sent people around to collect the pick sheets, Chairman Ofosu Ampofo said he would do the collation himself.

“When I was going to mounted the witness box, I called for the results from our people but the results they brought were not good enough for anybody to mount the witness box with, it will lead to embarrassment and so I decided not to go court with that results because they were indefensible.

“They then suggested that we should go to Lawyer Tsikata with the kind of results they brought. Lawyer Tsikata looked at the documents and returned them to us that they were not good enough and he was not prepared to proceed with the case with such evidence.

“He even thought that the EC violated the electoral laws and so the only option was to get Jean Mensa to mount the witness box to produce the information for us to proceed on that tangent. That was why when I was asked where my results were  I said I didn’t bring any results. If I become the chairman of the party, these things wont happen.”

Source: 3news.com|Ghana