Yesterday, President Bola Tinubu and the All Progressives Congress (APC) held firm that Peter Obi, the Labour Party’s (LP) presidential candidate, does not have a legitimate right to contest the result of the February 25 election, since he is not a member of the party. They also recommended that the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC) disallow him from running again if the election is annulled.
Obi and the LP jointly alleged that approximately 2.5 million votes, covering around 18,088 polling units, were rigged against him in the presidential poll. They also mentioned alleged over-voting in parts of the South West, and the negative impact of INEC’s failure to upload results to the IREV portal in real-time.
Tinubu and Kashim Shettima’s legal team, led by Chief Wole Olanipekun, countered that uploading results to the IREV was not mandatory and couldn’t have affected result collation. Olanipekun stressed that a Court of Appeal ruling had already affirmed INEC’s discretion regarding result collation method.
Focusing on a U.S. Court judgment that instructed Tinubu to relinquish funds suspected to be drug deal proceeds in his account, Olanipekun pointed out that under the 1999 Constitution, such a conviction expires after ten years.
Lateef Fagbemi, the APC’s lead counsel, agreed with all of Olanipekun’s oral arguments. He stated that although Obi’s petition was ambitious, it didn’t challenge that accreditation, voting, and collation of results took place.
INEC’s legal representatives, led by Abubakar Mahmoud, maintained that the Electoral Act prescribes a manual collation process and that issues with the BVAS machines on the presidential election day were technical glitches. He further stated that the IRev portal was essentially for public viewing and not for result collation.
On the contrary, the petitioners’ lead counsel, Livy Uzoukwu, claimed that the election was fundamentally flawed with 18,088 blurred results uploaded to the IREV. He emphasized that INEC should have provided the original copies of the polling unit results and that if the election was cancelled, Tinubu should be the one barred from running.
Uzoukwu remarked that it would be absurd to claim that acquiring 25 percent of votes from the country’s capital, the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), isn’t a requirement for anyone seeking the Nigerian presidency.
After hearing the arguments presented by both sides, the PEPC, led by Justice Haruna Tsammani, postponed judgment on the petition.
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