Election 2024: PPP heads to court over disqualification

The Progressive People’s Party (PPP) has announced plans to head to court to challenge its disqualification in the 2024 presidential election.

The Electoral Commission(EC) on Friday announced the disqualification of 11 presidential aspirants, including the PPP’s Kofi Asamoah-Siaw.

13 candidates have however been cleared to contest the election on December 7 after the vetting process.

According to the EC Chairperson, Jean Mensa, all candidates were given the chance to rectify errors on their forms after they were identified.

But while others complied, some candidates returned the forms with no corrections made.

Reacting to the development, the PPP National Chairman, Nana Ofori Owusu claimed the EC failed to give them an opportunity to rectify mistakes on its nomination forms.

“It is gross incompetence and it is a form of violating my natural right to due process. We are going to court without any ambiguity. We know that 2016 is the PPP that took the electoral commission to court, that reinstated all the people they had been kicked out. A similar thing will happen in 2024 because they have not learnt,” he stated in an interview with Accra-based Citi News.

Mr Owusu accused the electoral body of gross incompetence in the way the issue was handled.

“It is a grave injustice and it’s also sad for Ghana. It exposes the incompetence of Jean Mensa the head of the Electoral Commission. It is de’ja vu, it happened in 2016. The same error they committed in 2016. That the court’s revenge is the same error they have committed now.

“You know the PPP submitted all the necessary documentation to the EC within the stipulated time frame. Then the EC replied to the Progressive People’s Party facing exactly what they wanted us to correct. On the form, they listed pages for us to go and correct,” he added.

Mr Owusu continued, “We corrected these pages and resubmitted back to the Electoral Commission. When we submitted to the electoral commission, they have been incommunicado from the time that we submitted the document to them until today. Now, today we only hear when other colleagues were saying that they have been invited to the electoral commission at 04:00 p.m. but we were not informed of anything of the light.

“So quickly, in the morning, we wrote a letter to the electoral commission seeking an explanation as to why our name was not part of the names that they had listed. Around 1:14 via WhatsApp, the electoral commission responded to our request upon the request that they brought, all that they said was that they regretted there were some errors in the document. You see the law of natural justice.”