KPANDAI EXPLODES: NDC SAYS EC WAS ‘STEALING MANDATES’ — COURT PROVES THEM RIGHT
The High Court’s decision to order a new parliamentary election in the Kpandai seat has been hailed by the National Democratic Congress (NDC). The organization maintains that the court’s conclusion substantiates longstanding worries about electoral fraud on the part of some Electoral Commission officials. Rashid Tanko Computer, the Deputy Director of Elections and Information Technology for the NDC, said that the party had been exonerated of all charges after the court hearings. “Throughout this whole process, the NDC has been claiming that there are a number of dishonest election officials who are out to take people’s mandates away from them. And what was revealed today is one of them. On several occasions, we have said that the seat of Kpandai serves as the seat of the NDC. They manipulated the outcome of the election, and we have repeatedly said that we would not stop exposing dishonest election officials who will continue to manipulate the results of elections. Mr. Tanko said that the difficulty the NDC was facing had its foundation in the legislation, namely in CI 127, which sets out the regulations that govern parliamentary collation. “It is evident that Regulation 43, 1A up to H of the CI127 explicitly explains the procedure that is followed when collating parliamentary elections.” You compile results from two different forms that we have: Form 1C and Form 1D. After you have placed the summaries on Form 1D and declared the results, you should first compile the results from 1C. This did not occur. He claims that, rather of doing so, the officials of the Electoral Commission “organized themselves, ran to Tamale, cooked some results, and announced Nyindam as a parliamentary candidate-elect.” According to his statement, the NDC depended only on legal procedures in order to win the case in court. “In Ghana, the National Democratic Congress is the most legal political party. This decision was achieved by us without the use of unlawful methods. We made sure that we went through the procedure, and we have received a positive ruling. In addition, he issued a warning to the New Patriotic Party (NPP), the party that is now in power, cautioning them against participating in the by-election that is scheduled to take place in the near future. “I can tell you with complete certainty that we are appealing to our opponents, the NPP, and that they should not come for the by-election because we are going to deal them some serious losses,” “If they are still hoping to maintain some measure of respect in the eyes of the honorable citizens of Ghana, they ought to retreat, just as they did in Tamale Central,” he said.
