Minority Leader in Parliament and Member of Parliament (MP) for Effutu, Alexander Kwamena Afenyo-Markin, has expressed serious concerns about how the Kpandai parliamentary election petition is being handled at the High Court in Tamale.
In a public statement issued on his Facebook page on Friday, December 19, 2025, he writes:
WHEN JUSTICE BECOMES A NO-SHOW: JUSTICE BREW’S TROUBLING PATTERN
Justice Manuel Bart-Plange Brew of the High Court, Tamale did not sit yesterday. No ruling was delivered. No new date was fixed. Parties were simply informed by the Registrar that “He’s indisposed.”
This is not an isolated incident.
A FAMILIAR STORY
On 24 November 2025, Justice Brew nullified the entire Kpandai parliamentary election and ordered a fresh poll, even though the petition itself focused on alleged irregularities in a limited number of polling stations. The judgment immediately uprooted the mandate of Hon Matthew Nyindam, an MP who had secured 27,947 votes against 24,213 and a margin of 3,734.
In the aftermath, Hon Nyindam’s lawyers formally requested the written judgment. The court’s own indication was that the written reasons would follow shortly, but the document did not materialise on the initially indicated date and was only made available days later after repeated reminders from counsel. For a decision of such consequence, this initial delay already strained confidence.
PARLIAMENT PRESSES AHEAD
Instead of waiting for the appellate and supervisory processes to run their course, Parliament moved quickly to treat the Kpandai seat as vacant on the strength of this single High Court judgment. A formal notification was sent to the Electoral Commission indicating a vacancy, even though both an appeal and an application for certiorari were already in motion.
The Minority in Parliament had protested, urging that any steps to declare the seat vacant or trigger a rerun be paused until all the court processes had been concluded, in line with Parliament’s historical practice in earlier cases involving contested seats. Those protests were brushed aside and the administrative machinery for a by-election was set in motion while the very legality of the High Court decision remained under active judicial challenge.
HISTORY REPEATING
Following the judgment, Hon Nyindam filed a stay of execution application, asking the trial court to pause the implementation of its own far-reaching orders while those appellate and supervisory proceedings were pursued. In open court, Justice Brew indicated a firm date in mid-December for delivering his ruling on that stay.
Public accounts confirm that the High Court fixed 18 December 2025 for its ruling on Hon Nyindam’s stay of execution, a date that carried real weight because Parliament and the Electoral Commission had already begun to act on the assumption of a vacancy. That ruling could have restored legal coherence by aligning the court’s processes with the constitutional need for restraint while higher courts were seised.
Yesterday, that date arrived. Yet there was no ruling, no appearance by the judge and no replacement date announced, and only the word “indisposed.” In a vacuum, illness is understandable. In the context of repeated missed timelines in the same politically sensitive case, it begins to look like a troubling pattern rather than mere misfortune.
WHAT IS ACTUALLY AT STAKE
The facts are stark. Hon Nyindam won Kpandai with 27,947 votes to his opponent’s 24,213 and a clear majority in a race involving over 52,000 valid votes. The petition targeted alleged problems at a fraction of the polling stations and placed in dispute a relatively small bundle of votes compared with the margin.
Despite that, the High Court chose the most extreme remedy available. It nullified the entire constituency election and ordered a complete rerun across all polling stations. That decision not only strips an MP of his seat but also temporarily reduces NPP’s strength in Parliament and unsettles representation for the people of Kpandai. Parliament’s rapid move to declare the seat effectively vacant, over Minority objections and in the teeth of pending court cases, magnified the impact of that single, still-contested judgment.
THE SUPREME COURT STEPS IN
Faced with such an unreasonable and intrusive first-instance order, Hon Nyindam took the constitutionally available routes, an appeal and an application for certiorari at the Supreme Court, asking the apex court to quash the High Court judgment. On 16 December 2025, the Supreme Court issued an interim order directing the Electoral Commission to suspend all steps toward the Kpandai rerun, expressly to avoid out-running the Court’s eventual decision on the certiorari application.
The substantive challenge to the High Court judgment is still pending before the Supreme Court. In parallel, however, Hon Nyindam’s stay application before Justice Brew remains undecided. The ruling date set by the judge himself has now come and gone without any reasoned order.
THE QUESTIONS THAT MATTERS
Why do judges fix firm ruling dates in open court if those timelines are not treated as binding commitments? Litigants, Parliament and the Electoral Commission have all now organised their conduct around dates that the court itself has not honoured.
What does “indisposed” mean in this context? If His Lordship is unwell, he is entitled to every courtesy and every wish for full recovery. But in a case of this magnitude, the parties and the public deserve more than a single unexplained word. Even a brief, transparent administrative explanation and a prompt alternative date would show respect for the litigants’ rights and the constitutional stakes.
How many missed or shifting timelines, in the same case, are compatible with the impression of a court that is in full control of its own process? When a court has already taken the drastic step of cancelling an entire constituency’s election and other constitutional actors, Parliament and the Electoral Commission, have rushed to act on that decision despite pending challenges, any further opacity about the court’s own performance feeds anxiety about fairness, diligence and accountability.
WHAT RESPECT DEMANDS
Respect for the judiciary is not in question. It is a cornerstone of constitutional democracy. But respect is reciprocal. Litigants who comply with orders, file timeous applications and organise their lives and politics around court dates are entitled to expect that the court will, barring genuine emergencies, keep its own word.
Here, the High Court’s ruling has already triggered national consequences. It has altered the composition of Parliament, compelled the Electoral Commission to prepare a rerun and necessitated urgent intervention by the Supreme Court. In that context, unexplained or poorly explained failures to meet self-imposed deadlines are not minor administrative slips. They cut to the heart of how justice is perceived and experienced.
A SIMPLE AND REASONABLE REQUEST
With humility but also with firmness, this is the request. Justice Brew should appear promptly, give a clear and reasoned ruling on the stay of execution and bring procedural clarity to a case he has already placed at the centre of Ghana’s constitutional conversation.
The Court of Appeal is waiting. The Supreme Court is seised. Hon Nyindam is waiting. The Electoral Commission is waiting. Above all, the people of Kpandai, whose lawful votes are already in limbo, are waiting. Justice delayed is not only justice denied. When delay follows a sweeping and controversial judgment and when Parliament presses ahead as though that judgment were beyond question, it begins to look like something more troubling, a justice system that moves swiftly when taking away rights and hesitates when called upon to justify that choice.
Your Lordship, the remedy is within your hands. Show up. Deliver the ruling you promised. Let the law, not uncertainty and institutional haste, decide what happens next in Kpandai.
