A member of government’s communications team has said the Presidential Election Petition currently before the Supreme Court is nothing but “political gimmickry” which will be a total waste of time. According to Twum Barima, who is also a lawyer the petitioners are talking tough but have little to show in terms of evidence. On Joy FM and Multi TV’s news analysis programme, Newsfile, the NDC communicator singled out Dr Mahamudu Bawumia for criticisms, describing him as a man with a “mathematical problem”. He was discussing the filing of affidavits by petitioners who are seeking to invalidate the results of the 2012 December elections which declared President John Mahama winner of the elections. According to him, the 2012 Vice presidential candidate of the NPP who also doubles as the second petitioner and head of statistics for the petitioners has shown a striking deficit in mathematics, adding, the poverty of statistical understanding which informed Dr Bawumia’s lecture on inflation late last year is evidently at play in this whole election petition. He said whilst the NDC is seriously assessing a petition and an affidavit which have no merit, the NPP is rather dabbling in empty political gimmickry. He said when the court begins the substantive hearing on April 16, the petitioners will not just have to prove whether there were irregularities in the 2012 election but must go ahead to prove that those irregularities were material or substantial enough to overturn the results of the elections so declared. He said the vigilance the NPP is purporting to show months after the elections ought to have been shown prior and during the elections. He said the petition will eventually waste everybody’s time and will achieve nothing. But Kweku Baako Jnr who was also on the show found it amazing how anybody could downplay the work done by the petitioners. He described as “amazing” the “scope and weight of material” presented by the petitioners to the court for scrutiny. Baako posited that if within 21 days after the December 2012 elections, the NPP could come out with such a comprehensive detail, it shows the extent of seriousness by the political party. According to him, the NDC made a similar attempt to invalidate the results of the 2004 elections but made a “very poor job at it” even after one and half years of gathering evidence. “I am amazed how anybody will adopt this dismissive approach to the 2012 petition,” he said. He was quick to point out that whichever way the case goes it will change Ghana’s electoral process in many significant ways.