President of policy think tank, Imani Africa, Franklin Cudjoe believes the Assin North by-election should not have happened.
Speaking on The Big Issue on Citi TV and Citi FM, Mr. Cudjoe said the election smacks of injustice against James Gyakye Quayson who got re-elected after he was kicked out of Parliament.
“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.”
Mr. Cudjoe also admonished the ruling NPP to be truthful with Ghanaians with the challenges confronting the country to avert such electoral defeats in the future.
“The NPP should be very afraid and must go back to the drawing board to restrategise and if I was the NPP’s strategist, I would have called the candidates to come clean and tell the whole country where they think the country is currently and what they think they can do to take it out otherwise, they will be recording these kinds of defeats.”
James Gyakye Quayson, of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) was re-elected in a landslide victory in the Assin North by-election organized on Tuesday, June 27, 2023.
He polled 17,245 votes representing 57.56 percent of the total votes cast to beat Charles Opoku of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), and Bernice Enyonam Sefenu of the Liberal Party of Ghana (LPG).
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 Mr. 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.
It found that Mr. Quayson had not shown evidence of renouncing his Canadian citizenship and that the Electoral Commission had granted him permission to contest the election without this evidence.
The by-election was fraught with alleged vote-buying with both the NPP and the NDC accusing each other.
Some National Democratic Congress observers also accused the NPP of firing gunshots at Assin Praso in an attempt to scare off voters which the NPP deny.
The police then moved in swiftly to arrest some suspects in connection with the shooting.
My Quayson eventually dedicated his victory to justice and the people of Ghana.
