Published 6th Sep, 2023

By Sodeeq Atanda

The Presidential Election Petition Court has resolved Peter Obi’s and Labour Party‘s presidential election petition in favour of Bola Tinubu.

While ruling on a preliminary objection raised by the All Progressives Congress against Obi, Justice Abba Mohammed held that the petitioners only made generic references to places where electoral malpractices allegedly occurred.

The court went further to state that the petitioners merely stated that they would be relying on spreadsheets containing an analysis of their claims but failed to plead those document. It, however, listed them as documents.

The judge also held that the petitioners had the first duty to state the particulars of their claims specifically. For instance, the LP claimed that some of their votes were deducted and added to that of the APC but it failed to provide material details of what it got before the deduction and information about the polling units where such deduction occurred.

Dissecting some paragraphs of the petitions, the judge stated that paragraphs 57 and 58 were clearly in conflict with the depositions in paragraphs 65, 65, 70 and 71 of its affidavit.

Mohammed further held that the petition was vague and lacked material evidence to succeed the scrutiny of the court.

On the other hand, the APC had disputed Obi’s membership of the LP but the court ruled that membership issues were part of the internal politics of a party.

Tinubu and the APC, who were the respondents in the lawsuit, had argued that the Obi joined the LP after the 30 days prescribed by law had expired.

The court also declared incompetent the submission of the APC that the failure of the LP to join Atiku Abubakar in its petition had made the petition defective.

In the final analysis, Justice Haruna Tsammani, the lead judge, finally declared the LP’s petition incompetent and upheld the success of Tinubu at the election.

All the reliefs upon which the LP petition were grounded were dismissed. Such reliefs included claims that Tinubu forfeited $460,000 as proceeds of drug trafficking to the US government, failure to score 25 percent of the total votes cast in the Federal Capital Territory and immediate transmission of votes from polling units to the INEC result viewing portal.

Dismissing the result transmission prayer, the court held that the portal is not a result collation centre and that the Independent National Electoral Commission cannot be compelled on how to collate election result. More so, the law has not mandated a compulsory electronic collation of election results.

Justice Tsammani also touched on the interpretation of whether a candidate must score 25 percent of total votes in Abuja. He resolved that Abuja has the status of a state and it is to be treated in the same way as other states of the federation.

On the general preponderance of the evidence, the court further held that the petitioners had the legal onus of proving the case on the strength of its claims and not on the weakness of the respondents’ case.

Having concluded that the LP failed to substantiate and were unable to prove substantial non-compliance with the electoral law, the lead judge dismissed the petition for lacking merit.

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