President of IMANI Africa, Franklin Cudjoe, has asserted that the Assin North by-election conducted on Tuesday, June 27, 2023, was a waste of money.
According to him, the by-election was a travesty of justice on the expunged Member of Parliament, James Gyakye Quayson.
Speaking on Citi TV’s Big Issue programme and monitored by GhanaWeb, Franklin Cudjoe described the defeat of the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP) as shameful amidst vote-buying allegations.
He said, “This election should not even have happened in the first place. It was a simple travesty of justice dolled out to Gyakye Quayson and we wasted money unnecessarily to conduct another by-election and this whole thing is extremely shameful and we should not even have started this evil enterprise.
“It was an evil enterprise that should not have birthed but unfortunately, it was birthed and it birthed a stillborn and a stillborn resulting in the defeat of the ruling party and of course, the rebirth of Quayson,” Franklin Cudjoe stated.
On Tuesday, June 27, 2023, James Gyakye Quayson was re-elected as the Member of Parliament for Assin North constituency.
In a landslide victory, he polled 17,245 votes representing 57.56 percent of the total votes cast.to beat his main contender, Charles Opoku of the New Patriotic Party (NPP).
It would be recalled that the Assin North seat became vacant after the Supreme Court ordered Parliament to expunge Gyakye Quayson’s name from its records in a ruling on May 17.
The Supreme Court ruled that James Gyakye Quayson was not qualified to contest the 2020 parliamentary election in the Assin North constituency at the time he filed his nomination forms on October 9, 2020, due to his Canadian citizenship.
Source: ghanaweb.com