Immediate-past head of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) legal team, Abraham Amaliba, has disclosed how it took a siren of a Member of Parliament (MP) to avert the scuttling of the party’s 2023 presidential and parliamentary primaries.
Amaliba celebrated how the legal team in his words, “abridged time,” stressing that the plaintiff in the said case did not wish the NDC well because the date on an original application was beyond the election date – which meant the process was in danger.
He narrated how the injunction against the conduct of the polls had been withdrawn but that “two hours after we dealt with that application, we had an innocuous application filed at Adenta High Court.”
Amaliba said he had left the court after the earlier withdrawal and gone home to sleep.
“I received a call from the General Secretary (Fifi Kwetey) that another suit had been filed at the Adenta High Court and that the EC say they can’t proceed,” Amaliba recounted adding that the Electoral Commission’s lawyer having been served called him to say they could not proceed.
“I knew if I had told him (the EC lawyer) the plaintiff is going to file a notice of withdrawal, they would close that office and run away, so I didn’t inform him of that, I said ‘okay.’
“Then quickly, I came back to the office, worked on Notice of Withdrawal and acted like a lawyer for the plaintiff, he should have been doing that or his lawyer.”
The next challenge was how to get the notice to the EC in good time and that was when the Madina MP’s siren came into the picture.
“We got to Adenta High Court, luckily for me Sosu was there, because we were thinking of how to get to the EC in good time, we were talking of okada, Uber, Sosu was in court doing his own business.
“I said, my brother use your siren and that is what saved our day, else, the EC was not going,” he concluded.
Amaliba, was speaking at the closing ceremony of the 3rd Annual Lawyers Conference of the NDC held in Akosombo on September 3, 2023.
He formally handed over the baton as head of the legal team to Edudzi Kudzo Tameklo in the party’s most recent reorganization of appointments ahead of the 2024 General Elections.
Source: ghanaweb.com
