The NPP General Secretary, Justin Frimpong Kodua, has accused the Electoral Commission (EC) of disobeying a court order and behaving in contempt by holding a repeat of the Ablekuma North parliamentary election.
According to him, the court expressly asked the EC to collect pending polling station results and announce a winner, not to call a new election.
Speaking on JoyNews’ PM Express on Tuesday, July 8, Kodua stated that the party has taken the matter to court and had cited the EC for contempt.
“That is why we are in court. Do you know the details of our writ?” he asked. “The EC has been cited for contempt of court because the directive from the court is explicit. Go collate and declare. You cannot vary the order of the court.”
Kodua said the Electoral Commission does not have the legal authority to unilaterally decide to organize a rerun, especially when a court order has directed otherwise.
“It does not lie on the EC to conduct elections, and after elections, sit in the office and say that for convenience’s sake, based on their own extensive investigation or knowledge, we are going to do a rerun. That will be a bad precedent for this country,” he warned.
He stressed that the EC’s only legal option if it had issues about the court instruction was to return to court for a new order, not to act on its own initiative.
“If, in any case, you had legitimate concerns that the directive that the court has given is unenforceable, the only remedy is to go back to the court to get a further directive or a varied directive,” he argued.
The NPP General Secretary also raised concerns about the breakdown of law and order during the initial coalition process, suggesting political interference and failure of state institutions.
“Our institutions are supposed to be impartial. That’s why it’s important they remain professional,” he said. “So are you trying to tell me that the reason why the police failed to provide security for us to complete the collation of the three outstanding polling stations was because they were working at the behest of this government?”
He further questioned the integrity of the Electoral Commission’s process, saying the EC had relied on the NPP’s own scanned pink sheets to complete parts of the earlier collation, as some original documents were destroyed during chaos at the coalition centre.
“The NPP scanned all our 281 pink sheets and collated our results. Before we went to the Electoral Commission, we knew our candidate had obtained 34,613 as against the NDC candidate’s 34,199—a difference of 414 votes. So we were very sure,” Kodua said.
He expressed dismay that after relying on the party’s documents, the EC had now “turned around and made a certain U-turn to run polls again in 19 polling stations.”
