After watching the supreme court hearing for seven days and praised certain decisions made by the Supreme Court my question is how on earth have the Supreme Court did not ask Dr Bawumia to provide a hardcopy (print) of all evidence he has to the court even from his CD-ROM just for scrutiny if it could be permitted in court. This is the reason we are where we are now. The CD-ROM should be demanded since it is not too late, so that in the end it will not be that I had the evidence on a CD-ROM and they refused to look at it. I have an NPP friend here who laughs and say that even of the NPP is allowed to use the almighty CD-ROM they will still make a mess of themselves. My other advise to Dr. Bawumia is that if he is serious of winning the case for the NPP he should make a hardcopy (print) of the analysis he has stored on his favourite CD-ROM so that he can respond to all questions in an orderly fashion any time he is quizzed. He holds a doctorate degree, so he should know how to do a summary. At his level any time you do an analysis and write a paper there is no way you will not remember the total and important contents of what you analyzed with just a few notes in hand. The CD-ROM can be produced in Adobe PDF (format) and encrypted or locked in other to protect it from being altered. This sort of material could be sent electronically by the petitioner to the courts and the respondents even if not as CD-ROM form or in print. By the way, a CD-ROM is just an electronic storage device, which was invented after the floppy disc and zip. This was followed by the flash drive and external hard drives. This CD-ROM we are not sure if it will be acceptable in court at all. The position of the court have to be ruled early in the day and if not the court should stop Dr. Bawumia from making fetish references to it. I do not also know if he just wanted to make show about his knowledge of power point presentation. Gone are the days when it was said that, "if you want to hide reason from an African put it in a book." Should Dr. Bawumia be playing this card will be so absurd because every kid is literate and many can study any thing online there is nothing that he could show on that CD-ROM that people today will not understand especially if he is quizzed on his data-set, the data grouping and sampling and general methodology. Otherwise, it will set a bad precedent for the future when people will manipulate data on any new technology and insist that is what the would like to use knowing very well it will not make sense anyway. Think about it that a suspect comes to court and say he will not answer unless they allow him to consult his sorcerer or even his "talisman." This is exactly the posture of the NPP's petitioner throughout the hearing. So without clear cut rules today any person in future like Dr. Bawumia will demand in another election that he should be allowed to use a kindle, an iPod, I-Pad, iPhone, external hard drive, a tablet and what have you say by 2016. The rules of the Supreme should crisp and equal for all. The emphasis is just counting of numbers and should not be turned into a "desk research and analysis. Such that only the primary data should be used and rightly so the supreme court was clear about this on court day-three. Any other data will be a subsidiary and secondary day just like what Dr. Bawumia has on his CD-ROM and it is flawed in analysis and prone to manipulation. The Supreme Court should use the services of the relevant state institutions such as University professors in econometrics in the University, social sciences and Department of Statistics to scrutinize this seemly researched empirical analysis of Dr. Bawumia. It is as simple as this he might have used a simple null-hypotheses and T-tested on his data. He has the benefit of a quantum of free electoral data that he could use for any research paper or even write a book to make a buck and I will not be surprised if the secret CD-ROM is not put online for sale. The danger to Dr. Bawumia's analysis, as he has always alluded to I may caution in such analysis as Dr. Bawumia gave evidence of with all his opulence of 4-Ds; Duplication, Dishonesty, Diversionary and Deceit. We now know that he had subsequently eliminated a lot of the polling stations he contested and most recently, by Day-6 alone 800 polling stations were not being considered any more. These he says he has not used on his "fetish" CD-ROM analysis.
I am not sure what Dr Bawumia is alluding to at this stage. Is he telling the whole world that he has written a research paper that he intends to submit to say, "India's Economic and Political Weekly" in Mumbai or some social science conference? So that he has to keep this analysis of his election petition on a CD-ROM and no one will access and assess it? And he is using the Supreme Court as his ultimate conference hall for a rigorous peer review. Considering that the NPP just included polling stations that were won by the NDC. Already any statistician will debunk this sampling method as biased. I dare him that to publish it online then the whole Ghanaians around the world who able will peer review it. Because 99.99% of Ghanaians including those who voted for the NPP in the quiet of their homes now believe in their hearts that President Mahama won the election. Because if you consider the most recent elections around the world USA, Kenya, Ghana's election results were just as close but the court decided on behalf of the wining candidate. My doubts are whether any furtherance in this ding-dong battle between petitioners making fetish to a CD-ROM which is not tenable in court will bring a sensible close to the case for Ghanaians to move on to raise their productivity, end their strikes and cool their heads. Instead of this dragging on with no end in sight after court day seven, but just to satisfy the wishes of a few selfish social elites led by Nana Akufo-Addo. Therefore, my prediction is that Supreme Court should look seriously into a way of finding an end date and at best by the end of next week May 3, 2013. The reason being that the court will be going nowhere with the petitioner's posturing.
Source: Doe, James W. worlator44@hotmail.com
