'Watch out! We will prove Akufo-Addo did not get over 50 percent' - Ayine

A spokesperson for petitioner John Dramani Mahama's legal team has said they will prove that president Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo was not validly elected in the December 2020 presidential polls.

According to Dominic Ayine, the presidential petition currently before the Supreme Court was a case of mathematical computation about whether or not the president achieved the constitutional threshold of over 50% of valid votes cast.

Ayine addressed the press at the end of the first day of the Election Petition trial.

“We warned you that a big plank of the case concerns the mathematics of article 63 (4), whether or not Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo as a presidential candidate crossed the constitutional threshold of more than 50% of the vote.

“Our case is that he did not and we will prove that in court. Just watch out in the next few days,” he stressed. The Bolgatanga East MP averred that the performance of the petitioner’s first witness in the box showed that John Dramani Mahama’s petition was not empty.

The first witness was in the person of Johnson Asiedu Nketia, General Secretary of the National Democratic Congress, NDC.

“We have to underscore the fact that we are not in this case because we want to joke with the Ghanaian people. At the end of the day, the issues of accountability. The issue of the mathematics of article 63 (3), and you saw it in court when calculators were flying around, were we the ones who brought calculators to court?” he quizzed.

Ayine also slammed what he said was poor case management, a situation that during today’s hearing showed when the court could not play some audio-visual content because it was not prepared for such.

The election petition hearing continues on Monday, February 1, 2021, after an adjournment by the 7-member panel presided by the Chief Justice, Kwasi Anin-Yeboah.