In the event that the February 25th election was thrown out, President Bola Tinubu and the All Progressives Congress (APC) have petitioned the Presidential Election Petitions Tribunal (PEPT) to bar the Labour Party’s Peter Obi from running again.
The legal team for Tinubu and Kashim Shettima, led by Chief Wole Olanipekun, asserted that Peter Obi is not a labor party member and does not have the legal standing to contest the election results.
According to Anaedoonline.ng, Obi and LP claimed in their combined appeal that the presidential election was rigged against him in over 2.5 million votes cast in over 18,088 polling places, including some in the South West. Additionally, he said that INEC failed to upload results to the IREV portal in real time negatively impacted the polls.
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However, Olanipekun contended that INEC had discretion over how the election results were tallied and that the Court of Appeal, Lagos division, had decided against the Labour Party.
He stressed that Peter Obi was not a member of the Labour Party when he ran for the election and as such has no legal standing to bring a case or be permitted to participate in a rerun. He continued by saying that because Obi is not the second runner-up, he has no legal right to challenge the election or be included in a rerun.
Regarding the ruling by the US Court ordering Tinubu to forfeit money believed to be the proceeds of drug sales discovered in his account, Olanipekun pointed out that the 1999 Constitution provides that a conviction expires after 10 ten years.
On the other hand, the ministerial nominee and main attorney for the APC, Lateef Fagbemi (SAN), supported all the oral points made by Olanipekun and claimed that despite Obi’s ambitious petition, it did not contest the fact that there was no voting, no accreditation, and no collation of results.
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He said: “If anybody wants to attack any election results, there has to be polling unit by polling unit proof, but this is abysmally lacking in this petition.”
He declared that the much-discussed question of a rerun, which Obi had alternatively asked, should be decided between Tinubu and PDP presidential candidate Atiku Abubakar.
On Tuesday, the legal counsel for INEC, under the direction of Abubakar Mahmoud, adopted all of his written arguments against Obi’s petition.
He claimed that the evidence presented in court demonstrated that INEC took considerable care to guarantee that the software used on the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) equipment was created to operate flawlessly. Without offering any supporting evidence, he claimed that the petitioners had invented an alleged “electronic collation system” in their minds.
Mahmoud requested that the court reject the petitioner’s claim of willful human tampering by arguing that what happened to the BVAS machines on the day of the presidential election was a technical error.
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He said that the INEC Results Viewing Portal, or IRev, was primarily intended for public viewing rather than for the collection of results.
“Petitioners have failed to show how the failure to show real-time impacted on the elections,” Mahmoud said.
Mahmoud contended that the court should discountenance the arguments of so called 18,088 blurred results on IREV.
“Those blurred results that was uploaded on IREV, according to the petitioners, did not in any way suggest that the original copies of the result sheets were blurred,” Mahmoud said.
He added that Obi had not tendered copies from their LP agents to substantiate their case.
“Their blurred results were simply for dramatization. Those arguments of blurred results hold no issue at all,” Mahmoud said.
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Mahmoud stated that the court should not take a stance that will lead to absurdity in reference to receiving 25% of the votes in the FCT.
The INEC attorney urged the court to reject Obi’s plea and rule that the FCT is equivalent to every other state.
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