3 Officials Arrested
Published in Daily Guide on February 18, 2013
Salamatu Usman arrested by the Police
By Charles Takyi-Boadu
It appears Dr Kwadwo Afari-Gyan and the Electoral Commission (EC) are
desperate, in a quest to gather ‘further and better particulars’ to
defend the commission at the Supreme Court over the petition filed by
the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) challenging the outcome of the
2012 general elections.
The EC has dispatched its officials to the regions after collecting
evidence from the petitioners, the three New Patriotic Party (NPP)
leaders including the party’s December 2012 presidential candidate Nana
Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, to get all unsigned documents authenticated in
view of the court dispute over the December polls.
Other petitioners challenging the commission’s declaration of John
Dramani Mahama as President are Nana Addo’s running mate, Dr. Mahamudu
Bawumia and the party chairman, Jake Otanka Obetsebi-Lamptey.
But some of the secret agenda have leaked into the public domain, as
some of the officials who participated in the elections have declined to
sign.
There were a number of reports over the weekend of attempts by
officials of the EC to get some Presiding Officers, especially in the
Northern Region, to now sign ‘pink sheets’ used during the disputed
elections, two months after the elections.
One such incident which got to the attention of
DAILY GUIDE
happened in Walewale where the Presiding Officer, a certain Abdul Basit
Musah, was approached by the Returning Officer for the EC, one Richard
Ayamba, to append his signature to the document.
Interestingly, the issue of unsigned pink sheets is a major part of
the irregularities the NPP has complained of, and is seeking to prove
that they affected the conduct and outcome of the elections and for
which the Supreme Court is being asked to overturn the declaration of
President John Dramani Mahama as winner of the presidential elections
conducted by the EC.
Abdul Basit, who manned the ‘Cotton Office’ polling station in Walewale, confirmed the incident to
DAILY GUIDE when confronted with the information upon a tip-off that he was involved in some underhand dealings with some EC officials.
On the contrary, he narrated that he was in school last week Thursday
when a visibly desperate official of the Electoral Commission, Richard
Ayamba, came to him and requested that he sign an unsigned pink sheet
from his polling station.
He indicated that the request by the EC official baffled him since
according to him, the same man had crosschecked everything on the sheet
when he submitted it on December 8 2012, after collating the figures and
gave the green light for the ‘statement of polls’ and declaration of
results from the polling station to be included in the results for the
Walewale constituency.
Complicity
However, he declined the request on the basis that copies of the
unsigned sheet had already been given to representatives of the various
political parties who were present and for which reason signing the
sheet could make him complicit in an attempt to cover up wrongdoing in
view of the Supreme Court case.
Upon refusal, Basit claimed Mr Ayamba, the EC official, became
furious and asked him whether he wanted to put them and the Electoral
Commission in trouble.
Basit said he set conditions for the officer to fulfill if he indeed wanted him to append his signature to the document.
He asked the EC official to assemble all polling agents present at
the polling station on the election day or at least gather
representatives of the parties within the constituency before he would
sign, a condition he said the official could not meet.
Apart from that, he also demanded that the EC official should
retrieve all the pink sheets given to the political parties for him to
sign all of them, a condition he could also not meet since according to
him, the EC official said that would waste time.
This was said to have infuriated Mr Ayamba who then decided to leave.
But before leaving, he allegedly told Basit that his pink sheet was the
only one which was left to be signed and that six other presiding
officers in the East Mamprusi district, which had the Walewale and
Yagaba Kubori constituencies, had all signed theirs and these were
subsequently dispatched to the EC headquarters in Accra.
Justification
The Returning Officer, Richard Ayamba, indeed confirmed approaching
Abdul Basit with the said pink sheet though he saw nothing wrong with
his actions.
“There is nothing fishy about it,” he told
DAILY GUIDE, insisting
that the forms were brought to the Regional Head Office of the EC in
Tamale for him to get those who did not sign the pick sheets to append
their signatures to them.
Asked why he was taking the pink sheets around for them to be signed
two months after the elections, Mr Ayamba responded: “It didn’t come
from me as an individual because we had handed over all the statement of
polls to our officers. So it was just because I was the Returning
Officer that it was brought for me from the region. I didn’t go to
manufacture the pink sheets.”
But Northern Regional Director for the EC, Sylvester Kanyi did not
tell whether or not he had indeed instructed Returning Officers in the
region to go round and get Presiding Officers who did not sign their
pink sheets to do so, when
DAILY GUIDE contacted him.
He claimed to have only heard about the development on radio while in
Kumasi and therefore declined to make further comments until he had
been fully briefed on the matter.
