Why Supreme Court should dismiss petitioners’ case if… Alex Segbefia

Isaac Yeboah Politics Jun - 17 - 2013 , 17:25 4 minutes read

A former deputy Chief of Staff, Mr. Alex Segbefia is asking lawyers for the respondents in the election petition case to apply to the court to dismiss the case if it turns out that the number of pink sheets presented by the petitioners as evidence does not tally with what they told the court.

He told Radio Gold on Monday that a preliminary report by auditing firm, KPMG, suggests that there is a shortfall of about 2,000 pink sheets between what the petitioners claim to have filed and what KPMG has recorded, and since the whole case of the petitioners is based on the pink sheets, the case cannot stand.

He however wants the lawyers to kick in that application only after a confirmation via a final KPMG report to the court that indeed the disparity exists.

Lawyers for the petitioners; Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, who was New Patriotic Party presidential candidate in the 2012 election; his running mate, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia; and NPP chairman, Jake Otanka Obetsebi Lamptey claim to have filed 11,842 pink sheets as evidence to back their allegations of malpractices and illegalities that attended the polls and for which they want the court to annul a number of votes and declare Nana Addo the winner.

But according to Alex Segbefia, since the petitioners have made the pink sheets their rigid evidence, a disparity of that magnitude changes the face of what exactly the case is and should naturally render the case a bad one.

“For me it’s almost like statistics. For example every statistics that you give you’re given maybe one or two, sometimes three percent margin of error but when you have a margin of error that is close to maybe 16, 20 percent of what you are actually talking about then the whole statistical basis for bringing a case, making an analysis …, people cannot rely on anything you are putting forward because actually the figures you are dealing with, the margin of error is too great.”

He said a disparity of 2,000 pink sheets add up to a huge number of votes and will only mean that the case is not properly before the court and the petitioners will then need to go and come back to the court to restate their case with properly audited pink sheets.

According to Alex Segbefia, since the petitioners have built their case rigidly on the ‘gospel according to pink sheets’ and have held that the Electoral Commission which ran the election over two days had no room for error, it does not sound right that the petitioners should be allowed room to accommodate their own errors when they had had ample time to prepare their case before going to court.

He drew a distinction between instances where the petitioners had filed but the respondents did not receive the evidence in which case they only needed to be served with the missing documents and where the petitioners did not file the alleged shortfall at all and said in the latter case the benefit of doubt must not inure to the petitioners advantage.

Asked if his argument is not based on a mere technicality, he said on the contrary, the whole case is built on pink sheets, and if you take out 2,000 pink sheets out of the lot that the petitioners claim to have filed, “you then have to find out whether in every scenario that they have painted it would have changed the results to the extent that John Mahama would not have won outright. You have to go and do that calculation but why should we do that calculation or wait for them to do that calculation? Because they have done the calculation on 11,000 pink sheets but they have gone to court at the moment, as far as we know on the interim (report), on 9,000 pink sheets, so somebody has to go and recalculate…”

He said a legal aspect to the issue is that parties must know exactly what they answer to and it cannot be the case that the respondents do not know what number of pink sheets representing polling stations are in contention because the petitioners did not file them.