The upcoming New Patriotic Party (NPP) parliamentary primaries for the Binduri Constituency in the Upper East Region faces a legal injunction just days before the elections.
A plaintiff, Alex Amolbugri Avoka, filed a motion on notice at the Bolgatanga High Court seeking an interlocutory injunction against the defendants—the NPP national and regional executives as well as the Electoral Commission—to halt the Binduri parliamentary primaries.
The injunction application specifically aims to stop the acclamation of a sole candidate as the parliamentary contestant for Binduri on grounds that it would be unfair. The plaintiff contends that allowing only one candidate to run unopposed deprives the constituency members of options to choose their preferred representative.
Richard Abaaduko Adazabra Esq., representing the plaintiff, argued before the court that allowing all aspirants to contest will serve the interests of democracy and the party at large.
The court is expected to rule on the injunction application on 25th January 2024, two days before the scheduled Binduri NPP parliamentary elections.
When Alex Avoka spoke to Mark Smith on the Day Break Upper East Show today, he stated that there is a deliberate and consistent, albeit illegal attempt to boot him out of the elections.
“The fact is that what they used to disqualify me was baseless. You people said I have reduced my age. Secondly, you said I have not even been to the university. These are what they used to disqualify me. They even asked me to go for an appeal in Accra. I went for the appeal with my university documents and an affidavit I had in the Kumasi High Court. When I went to the Appeals Committee, they told me I would hear from them. What they [National Parliamentary Vetting Committee at the Regional Level] said was that I hadn’t gone to the school at all.”
Mr. Avoka explained that he only saw that his disqualification had been upheld by the National Appeals Committee but had not been written to officially. He went on to claim that his private conversations with the National Chairman of the party, Stephen Ntim, confirmed that his disqualification had been overturned, thus his surprise that his disqualification was upheld by news on social media.
The disqualified candidate hopes for redemption through the courts.
Here’s a proofread version of the provided text:
“But the party has described the actions of Alex Avoka, the disqualified candidate, as ones done in bad faith. When Elvis Awonekai Atia, the Upper East Regional Secretary of the NPP, spoke on the same platform, he would have expected Mr. Avoka to allow the issues to lie and to support the bigger interest of the party.
“When I received the letter, I thought it was in bad faith because if there were issues that you want clarity on, they could have come early so that they would have been addressed. But you can clearly see that this was done to spite us. As for court, anybody can go to court, and the court is there to adjudicate over the matter. I am not too perturbed, but I think that it is unfortunate that we would have to take this slippery road.”
When asked about the impression that Mr. Avoka seeks to create, that there is a deliberate attempt to unjustifiably get him out of the race, Mr. Awonekai Atia responded, saying, “Well, he brought this on himself.”
“First of all, the constituency elections committee cannot be wrong, and the national parliamentary committee cannot take the same decision which is wrong. Then you are given the opportunity to go to the national appeals committee, and the committee still thinks that decisions taken by these two committees are in the right direction and also decided to disqualify you. Even if he thought that the national appeals committee too was maybe siding with us and was also wrong, the matter traveled to the national executive committee.”
Mr. Awonekai Atia, while reluctant to disclose full details to the public, insisted that there was more to the decisions that were “rightly” taken by the committees.
Source: A1radioonline.com|101.1MHz|Mark Kwasi Ahumah Smith|Ghana
