Attorney-General and Minister of justice Godfred Yeboah Dame has called on members of the Ghana Bar Association to stand in solidarity with the Electoral Commission against misguided attacks from the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC).
According to him the NDC is engaged in a “misguided, parochial and unwarranted” attacks on the EC.
“I consider it fitting as the leader of the Bar, to call on lawyers to support the Electoral Commission as presently constituted, to persist in its quest to deliver for the nation a free, fair and credible election capable of measuring up to the test of international standards, and also for the Bar to resist the misguided and parochial efforts of certain characters to undermine our democracy through unwarranted attacks on the Electoral Commission”.
“I am pleased to observe that over the course of time, the Electoral Commission of Ghana clearly has demonstrated a sound understanding of the sacred responsibility it bears to the people of Ghana to organise elections in a manner prescribed by the Constitution. This clear understanding of its basic duty to hold credible elections was firmly established in 2020, when under the most trying conditions forced upon the world by COVID-19, the Electoral Commission of Ghana remained unshaken in its quest to give the people of Ghana an opportunity to select their own leadership. The Electoral Commission indeed rose to the occasion and delivered an internationally affirmed free, fair, and perhaps, the most transparent elections in Ghana since the inception of the Fourth Republican Constitution” he said.
He added: Such was the credibility of the election that the complaints of unfairness made in the Supreme Court by a losing candidate in the Presidential election, strangely bordering on allegations of “wrong aggregation of votes” and “vote padding,” even though proven to be untrue at the trial, collectively involved a meagre 6,622 votes – an amount patently insignificant to materially affect the outcome of an election in which the winner won by well over 500,000 votes. It is important to note that the total number of registered voters in the last election was 17,027,941. The total number of valid votes cast (definitely less than the turnout) was over 13 million. Without belaboring the point, I allude to these figures to demonstrate that the appetite of the people of Ghana to freely choose their leaders in the generally acclaimed best way remained the same even in the teeth of COVID-19″
Pak MediaGh
