NPP members begging me not to sue Bawumia - Anyidoho

Deputy General Secretary of the governing National Democratic Congress (NDC), Mr Koku Anyidoho, has said some members of the opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP) are begging him to abort plans to sue the vice-presidential nominee of the NPP, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, over the “fake” Togolese register of voters he used as evidence to support his argument that there were some foreigners on Ghana’s electoral roll.

Dr Bawumia, last year, produced a document which he said was a copy of the Togolese register and claimed that having used the biometric facial recognition technology, it was realised that there were some 76,000 persons who existed on Ghana’s register of voters as well as that of Togo.

But the NDC challenged Dr Bawumia to submit those names to the Electoral Commission so they could be deleted from the register as the election management body carries out its voter exhibition exercise.

To the extent that that had not been done, Mr Anyidoho believes Dr Bawumia’s action constitutes a criminal offence under Section 251 of Act 29 of the Criminal Offences Act 1960, hence he intends filing a suit against the former Deputy Governor of the Bank of Ghana.

Speaking in an interview with Chief Jerry Forson, host of Ghana Yensom on Accra100.5FM Thursday August 4, Mr Anyidoho said: “During the exhibition, the law allows persons to submit evidence against people who are foreigners whose names are on the register in order to remove those persons’ names from it. How come Bawumia has not sent that evidence to the EC so that those 76,000 Togolese who voted in the Volta Region will be removed from the register? It tells you he was lying. It tells you that that document he brought was fake.”

He added: “…Who is Bawumia to be short-circuiting our electoral process? Like I said, and I have served notice, this same Bawumia, I am taking him to court [over] the fake Togolese register under the Criminal Offences Act 1960, Act 29 Section 251 [for] deceiving a public officer. I am doing the drafting of the petition, hopefully by Monday I will hand it over to the Attorney General and see how it goes.”

When asked by the host to mention the names of the NPP members who appealed to him to drop the case, he said: “They [NPP members] came to appeal to me to drop the case because they are our friends. Don’t forget we have friends in the NPP. We also have even family members.

Some NPP people are married to NDC people, so we cannot be disclosing those who [appealed], but it is true they appealed for me to drop the case because Dr Bawumia would not be able to produce any evidence, it would be too much of an embarrassment but I insisted on going to court due to the possible repercussions of his action”.