The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) nominee Alhaji Atiku Abubakar and his Labour Party rival, Mr. Peter Obi, filed separate challenges to overturn President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s election victory. The Supreme Court has scheduled Monday, October 23, 2023, for the hearing of both appeals.
The apex court announced the hearing date via notices sent to all parties on Thursday.
Remember that a five-member panel of the presidential election court chaired by Haruna Tsammani dismissed the petitioners’ lawsuits on the grounds that, among other things, they had not provided evidence to support their claims of electoral fraud against INEC, the Nigerian electoral commission, and Mr. Tinubu.
However, the pair are pleading with the Supreme Court to overturn the PEPC’s verdict that declared Tinubu of the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, to be the legitimate victor of the February 25 presidential election in their appeals.
In contrast to Atiku, who used a group of 67 attorneys, including 18 Senior Advocates of Nigeria (SAN) under the leadership of Chief Chris Uche, SAN, to challenge Tinubu’s election victory, Obi used his own legal team, under the direction of Dr. Livy Uzoukwu, SAN, to submit 51 grounds for appeal to the Supreme Court.
Both Atiku, who finished second in the election, and Obi, who finished third, are attempting to overturn the decision of the PEPC’s five-member panel under the leadership of Justice Haruna Tsammani, which dismissed the complaints they had filed against Tinubu on September 6.
Even though evidence showed that the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, acted in violation of the laws and regulations currently in effect guiding the conduct of elections, the former vice president insisted that the PEPC panel committed a legal error by failing to declare the presidential election invalid on the grounds of non-compliance with the Electoral Act, 2022.
He claimed that the Electoral Act of 2022 and the 1999 Constitution, as amended, were both grossly misconstrued and misrepresented in the PEPC’s majority ruling.
He asserts that “the lower court erred in law when it refused to uphold the mandatoriness of electronic transmission of results for confirmation and verification of final results introduced by the Electoral Act 2022 for transparency and integrity of results in accordance with the principles of the Act.”
The use of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, or BVAS, machines for electronic transmission of election results directly from the polling places to INEC’s collation system for the verification, confirmation, and collation of results before the announcement was claimed to be required by sections 64(4) and (5) of the Electoral Act and INEC’s Regulations & Guidelines for the conduct of the election, both of which he offered as evidence.
In contrast, Obi claimed in his own appeal that the PEPC panel made a legal mistake in dismissing his petition, leading to a flawed judgment.
He claimed that the panel incorrectly assessed the proof of evidence he presented and caused a serious injustice by holding that he did not identify the polling places where election irregularities had place.
Obi and the LP also criticized the PEPC for rejecting their claim since they failed to provide specifics regarding the numbers of votes or scores that were purportedly tampered with or inflated in favor of President Tinubu and the APC.
When the Justice Tsammani-led panel invoked paragraphs 4(1)(d)(2) and 54 of the First Schedule to the Electoral Act 2022 to strike out portions of the petition, they similarly charged the panel with violating the law.
While asserting that the lower court had violated his right to a fair trial, Obi insisted that the testimony of his witnesses had been incorrectly rejected as being incompetent.
He claimed that the panel had wrongfully rejected his claim that INEC had submitted 18, 088 blurred results on its IReV platform.
