The Action Peoples Party (APP) has accused President-elect Bola Tinubu of rigging the presidential election scheduled for February 25th, 2023.
The petition filed by APP is one of five distinct petitions made by various political parties and presidential candidates.
Tinubu’s victory was challenged in petitions filed before the Presidential Election Petition Court in Abuja.
Tinubu, who ran on the platform of the All Progressives Congress, was proclaimed the winner of the election by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) on March 1. (APC).
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Tinubu received 8.8 million votes, defeating the Peoples Democratic Party’s (PDP) presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, and the Labour Party’s presidential candidate, Peter Obi.
Atiku received 6,984,520 votes, while Obi received 6,101,533 votes.
Meanwhile, the presidential candidates and their political parties are suing to overturn the election results.
Nnadi Osita, the APP presidential candidate, received 12,839 votes in the election.
On March 19, the APP filed a petition at the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal in Abuja to challenge Tinubu’s victory.
Tinubu “corruptly encouraged” electoral officers at local government and state collation centers in “Kano, Kaduna, Imo, Rivers, Kebbi, Oyo, Ogun, Ekiti, Osun, Kogi, and Kwara states” to change the presidential election results in his favor, according to the petitioner.
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The party alleged that “fictitious figures were ascribed to” Mr Tinubu “thereby giving him substantial lead and advantage in the various states.”
Another issue the petitioner raised is vote-buying.
In the grounds of the petition, the petitioner said Mr Tinubu “engaged in monumental vote-buying and openly offered money and other gift items to voters in polling units spread across Kano, Kaduna, Imo, Rivers, Kebbi, Oyo, Ogun, Ekiti, Osun, Kogi and Kwara states.”
The petitioner further alleged that voters who turned down the president-elect’s inducement “were refused from voting, thereby reducing the votes ordinarily accruing to” it.
The party accused INEC officials of turning away while overvoting occurred at polling stations.
It went on to say that electoral authorities, in collusion with Mr Tinubu and APC agents, “falsified, manipulated, and mutilated (election) results from the various polling units” in the aforementioned eleven states.
The petitioner claimed that votes were assigned to polling locations in Orlu, Orsu, and Okigwe Local Government Areas of Imo State, citing instances where the presidential election could not be held owing to violence.
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“Scores were later ascribed and credited to” to Mr Tinubu “in respect of Orlu, Orsu and Okigwe Local Government Areas of Imo State, where no election held.”
The petitioner claimed that Mr Tinubu should not have been “returned elected as the president-elect” because of the alleged widespread irregularities.
The petitioner also called the election into doubt due to alleged noncompliance with the necessary provisions of the 2022 Electoral Act.
It said that INEC “has a bounden legislative obligation to transfer all results electronically and post them to the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV).”
The APP further claimed that the results of the presidential election on February 25 were meant to be transmitted straight from all polling units across Nigeria to the INEC IReV platform.
The electoral umpire “failed to comply with the law and instead adopted an illegal process of manual collation and transmission of the election results” instead of following the guidelines and laws on electronic results transmission.
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The petitioner claimed in court filings that the collation and proclamation of presidential results were based on “illegal allocation of votes” and did not reflect the real votes cast in Nigeria.
The party is also contesting Mr Tinubu’s victory, claiming that he was not elected by a majority of valid votes cast.
It claimed that Mr Tinubu did not receive the statutory 25% of votes cast in two-thirds of the states (24 states) and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).
“If the invalid votes ascribed to the 1st respondent (Mr Tinubu) as a result of corrupt practices, vote-buying, overvoting…and manipulation of election results, were taken away and deducted from the 8,794,726 votes, the 1st respondent would not have scored the majority of lawful votes at the election,” the petitioner argued in its submissions.
Tinubu’s age and educational qualifications are other grounds for the APP’s petition.
“The 1st respondent knowingly failed, omitted and concealed to state those schools in his educational qualifications, which he earlier under oath in 1999 claimed to have attended and obtained relevant certificates from.”
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The party said Mr Tinubu’s “under oath in his INEC Form CF001 in 1999, that he attended these schools (Government College, Obadan; Richard Daley College, Chicago, University of Chicago and Chicago State University) were all false and perturbed.”
The petitioner’s lawyer, Emeka Ozoani, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), urged the court to overturn the president-elect’s victory.
“That it may be determined that the declaration and return of the 1st respondent” by INEC “as the president-elect of Nigeria is invalid, null and void.”
The petitioner asked the court to order a fresh presidential election.
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