Election Petition: The Supreme Court decided Mahama had a cause of action – Tsatsu Tsikata

Tsatsu Tsikata, the lead counsel for Petitioner John Mahama in the just-ended Election Petition has explained that among the election petition verdict delivered on March 4, the justices unanimously decided that the preliminary objections raised by the Electoral Commission (EC) and President Nana Akufo-Addo had no merit.

“In other words, legally, what he [Mahama] brought before the court could not just be thrown out as a preliminary matter. So, I have to say that, in that respect, we achieved a very important step,” Tsatsu Tsikata explained on the KSM Show broadcast Friday and monitored by GhanaWeb.

“The fact that the decision went against us is part of the reality of court proceedings,” Tsatsu Tsikata stated.

John Dramani Mahama filed a petition to challenge Jean Mensa’s December 9 Declaration of the December 7, 2020 Presidential election results in favour of the NPP candidate Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.

The Supreme Court of Ghana in its judgement upheld the Jean Mensa’s Declaration of Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo as President-Elect of the Ghana.

The judgement means that Akufo-Addo was validly elected during the December 7, 2020, presidential election.

Reading the verdict of the court, Chief Justice Kwasi Anin-Yeboah who led the seven-member panel that sat from January 14 to March 4, 2021, said:

"The petitioner has not provided any evidence to rebut the evidence created by the presumption of CI135, for which his action must fail. We, therefore, have no reason to order a re-run as pleaded by the petitioner. We accordingly dismiss the petition as having no merit.”