In response to a lawsuit seeking to bar Peter Obi of the Labour Party and Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress from running for president in 2023, the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, responded on Friday.
In order to prevent Tinubu and Obi from choosing Kashim Shettima and Datti Baba-Ahmed as their running mates, the Peoples Democratic Party, or PDP, has taken INEC to court.
PDP requested that the court declare that Tinubu and Obi should be disqualified from running if they do not join their original running partners, Kabiru Masari and Doyin Okupe, in the lawsuit.
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Festus Okoye, the INEC commissioner for confirmation and education, reacted by saying that the court would be the sole authority on whether or not Tinubu and Obi should be disqualified from the 2023 presidential election.
Speaking on Arise TV on Friday, Okoye said INEC has not been served with the court processes.
He said; “So, I am not aware of whether we’ve been served with any document relating to any suit of the complexion that you have talked about. But let me just say that if a matter is in court, the matter is sub-judice and we are not supposed to comment on it. Secondly, when political parties submitted the names of their presidential candidates and their vice-presidential candidates, there was no provision for a placeholder in the forms they submitted.
“They submitted the forms for their presidential candidates and they submitted the forms for the vice-presidential candidates and that is the situation.
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“However, if you look at section 33 of the Electoral 22, it says that a political party shall not be allowed to substitute or change its candidate whose name has been submitted under section 29 of the Electoral Act, except in the case of death or withdrawal by the candidate. But it goes ahead to say that provided that in the case of such a withdrawal or death of the candidate, the political parties affected shall within the occurrence of the event hold a fresh primary election to produce and submit a fresh candidate to the commission for the election concerned.”
Masari’s name was initially submitted to INEC by Tinubu as a stand-in before the deadline for the nomination of running mates.
Obi also offered the name Okupe as a stand-in.
But Tinubu and Obi used Kashim Shettima and Baba-Ahmed instead of the original names.
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