Quarshie Idun, Tony Lithur nail Mahama

With seven days already spent in the ongoing Supreme Court election petition, it is no longer in doubt that the petitioners had a solid case to present to the Supreme Court and were not being frivolous as had been said many times by opponents of the New Patriotic Party especially.

However, when the history of this trial is written, much would be said about the strategies adopted by the respondents in the case especially the legal team of the 1st respondent, John Mahama and that of the 2nd respondent, the Electoral Commission; especially on the methods adopted in cross-examining lead witness of the petitioners, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia.

After 5 days of strenuous cross-examination by Counsels Tony Lithur and Quarshie Idun, what is apparent is that not only have the two failed woefully to destroy the petitioners case but they have also actually done the unthinkable to the case of the respondents by actually confining John Mahama and the Electoral Commission ultimately to defeat in the ongoing case.

Instead of attacking the case holistically and trying to destroy the claims of the petitioners wholesale, the strategy adopted by the two and especially counsel for the president, was to try to discredit certain pink sheets which they either claimed were duplicates or wrongly categorized.

In the end, Counsel for John Mahama came up with only around 400 pink sheets out of the 11,842 originally submitted by the petitioners which accounts for a mere 200,000 of the 4.3 million votes the petitioners are seeking the Supreme Court to annul.

Not only has this strategy been woefully inadequate to destroy the mountain of evidence the petitioners have presented but it has also meant that implicitly, the 1st respondent and the Electoral Commission, John Mahama have accepted that the other pink sheets they couldn’t find a problem were indeed full of irregularities on the face of it and that indeed those irregularities should not have occurred.

This was clearly bad thinking and strategy as it was obvious from the onset that the petitioners were going to submit thousands of documents which meant that any attempt at choosing pieces to discredit was destined to fail.

What is worse is the open admission to the Supreme Court by Counsels for John Mahama and the EC that indeed there were errors in the conduct of the elections. This admission of errors makes it almost impossible now for the court to determine that there were no irregularities, violations and malpractices in the conduct of the elections.

From everything that has happened over the last few days, it is very obvious that the Respondents in the case did not really understand the issues of the petitioners and are only beginning to realize the issues the petitioners are seeking to establish, but this has come too late in the day. The die seems cast.