Election petition: Jean Mensa must account for Akufo-Addo victory declaration – Ayine

The Chair of the Electoral Commission, Mrs Jean Mensa has a constitutional duty to account to the people of Ghana how she arrived at her declaration of victory for President Nana Akufo-Addo in the 7 December 2020 polls, a former deputy attorney general Dr Dominic Ayine has said.

Speaking to journalists on Tuesday, 9 February 2021 after the Supreme Court hearing of the ongoing election petition in which former President John Mahama is challenging the presidential results as declared by Mrs Mensa on 9 December 2020, Dr Ayine, who is part of Mr Mahama’s legal team, said: “The reason we are insisting that she be allowed to testify is simply because this is not a debt collection case”.

“We are not here dealing with a private matter; the private interest of private litigants. We are here dealing with the public interest, we are here dealing with the declaration of the results that reflected or is supposed to have reflected the sovereign will of the people of this country.

“We are here dealing with article 1 of the Constitution, which says that the sovereignty of Ghana resides in the people of Ghana in whose name and for whose welfare the powers of government must be exercised”, he noted.

“And, so”, he added: “For her [Jean Mensa] to have declared that the sovereign will of this country, as expressed on 7 December 2020, elected Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo as President of the Republic of Ghana, she has a constitutional duty to account to the people of this country as to how she arrived at that conclusion and that constitutional duty means that she cannot, under any circumstance, be allowed not to account to the people through cross-examination because cross-examination is one of the mechanisms allowed by law for exacting accountability of litigants and this is not an ordinary litigant; this is a constitutional officeholder and so our case is very different from some of the English cases that were being cited”.

The court will rule on Thursday, 11 February 2021 about whether or not Mrs Mensa and Mr Mac Manu should mount the dock.