The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), the Labour Party (LP), and their presidential candidates, Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi have asserted that a candidate must receive 25% of the vote in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) to be declared the winner of the election. President Bola Tinubu and Vice President Kashim Shettima have asked the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC) to disregard these assertions.
The Tinubu/Shettima legal team, led by Chief Wole Olanipekun, SAN, filed the two final addresses on Friday, according to information obtained by The Nation.
Tinubu and Shettima argued that neither of the two sets of petitions provided relevant evidence to support the plaintiffs’ claims that the election was not conducted following applicable laws or that the APC’s presidential and vice presidential candidates were ineligible to run for office. They described both petitions as strange and hollow.
The defendants claimed that the lawsuits could not even be viewed as petitions in the context of the country’s electoral laws because they were oddly not “complaining about election rigging, ballot box snatching, ballot box stuffing, violence, thuggery, vote buying, voters’ intimidation, disenfranchisement, interference by the military or police, and such other electoral vices.”
They said that the petitioners utterly failed to provide sufficient and pertinent evidence to support their allegations as required by law.
Atiku/PDP, “who was his closest rival, though trailing at a distance with the total of 6,984,520 votes,” and Obi/LP “came a distant third with a total of 6,101,533 votes,” according to Tinubu, who claimed victory with 8,794,726 votes.
In addition, the defendants claimed that while they received more than 25% of the votes cast in 29 states, Atiku did the same in 21, while Obi received 25% in only 16 states and the FCT.
They continued by pointing out how ironic it was that Atiku, who received 16.13 percent of the votes cast in the FCT compared to Tinubu’s 19.76 percent in the same region, is not only requesting to be declared the winner of the election but also that Tinubu’s victory be thrown out because he (Tinubu) did not receive 25% of the FCT votes cast.
The respondents stated that there is no punctuation (comma) in the entirety of Section 134(2)(b) of the Constitution, in particular, immediately after the words “states” and succeeding “and” connecting the Federal Capital Territory with the states. They cited earlier decisions of the Supreme Court on the status of the FCT.
In essence, the Constitution expressly requires a conjunctive reading of the subsection rather than a disjunctive one.
They argued that it was ironic that the LP candidate, who finished in a distant third place in the election, sought to be proclaimed the winner.
According to the respondents, the Obi/LP petition was predicated on baseless claims that the Tinubu/Shettima ticket was illegal because Shettima was improperly nominated, that the election results were not electronically uploaded to the IREV, and that it was not conducted following the requirements of the Electoral Act, 2022 (EA).
They continued by saying that Atiku and Obi also predicated their petitions, which were filled with erroneous and contradictory assertions, on “some fishing expeditions relating to some purported forfeiture proceedings in the United States of America (US).”
They criticized the petitioners’ assertions regarding Tinubu and Shettima’s qualifications, arguing that both respondents had offered sufficient proof that they were eminently qualified to run for president and vice president, despite the petitioners’ inability to back up their claims.
“Overall, the election went very peacefully, under a free and fair atmosphere, without proof of violence, ballot box snatching, and such other electoral irregularities and vices,” said Tinubu and Shettima. This was the situation that was attested to by every witness for the petitioners.
Both petitions, according to Tinubu and Shettima, lack any shape or substance and are rife with repetitions, contradictions, and ambiguity.
On the flimsy pretext that the polling unit results were not electronically transmitted and uploaded on the IREV (where collation did not take place), the petitioners cynically claimed non-compliance with the provisions of the Electoral Act, they observed that their witnesses had testified that manual collation had occurred from the polling unit level to the national level.
They continued, “At no portion did they state what they considered to be the lawful votes cast for both parties and the number of unlawful votes added to the respondent’s, or the number of votes unlawfully deducted from their votes, throughout the petitions, and during the trial, even though petitioners claimed that Tinubu did not win with the highest number of legally cast votes.”
The testimony of the 27 witnesses cited by Atiku/PDP and the 13 by Obi/LP, according to Tinubu and Shettima, was dubious. However, they maintained that their lone witness had successfully established their case.
They continued by stating that Senator Opeyemj Bamidele, the Senate Majority Leader, “demonstrated undeniable competence to testify regarding the subjects submitted before the court, including issues surrounding the US proceedings, being himself a US practicing attorney and counselor at law.”
CREDIT: The Punch
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