NAIJA NEWS
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Vice President Kashim Shettima have given reasons why the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC) should dismiss petitions filed by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), the Labour Party (LP), and their presidential candidates, Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi.
Naija News reports that Tinubu and Shettima insist that claims that a candidate must score 25 percent of votes in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) to be declared president could have been a result of either their misreading of the Constitution or their miscomprehension of the relevant provisions of the nation’s ground norm.
This publication gathered that these submissions were part of their arguments in two sets of final written addresses filed on the petitions by Atiku/PDP and Obi/LP against the outcome of the February 25 presidential election.
According to The Nation, the two final addresses were filed on Friday by the Tinubu/Shettima legal team, led by Wole Olanipekun (SAN).
Describing both petitions as strange and hollow, Tinubu and Shettima argued that neither of the two sets of petitions provided relevant evidence to support the claims of the plaintiffs that the election was not held in compliance with relevant laws or that the presidential and vice presidential candidates of the APC were not qualified to contest the election.
The defendants said the suits could not even be considered as petitions within the context of the nation’s electoral laws as they were strangely not “complaining about election rigging, ballot box snatching, ballot box stuffing, violence, thuggery, vote buying, voters’ intimidation, disenfranchisement, interference by the military or the police, and such other electoral vices.”
“The crux of their grouse, in their petitions, is that this time around, while the presidential election was peacefully conducted all over the country (as corroborated by their primary witnesses; that is, the Presiding Officers (POs) and the results accurately recorded in the various Form EC8As, some unidentified results were not uploaded electronically to the INEC Election Result Viewing (IREV) portal,” Tinubu and Shettima said.
Continuing, they said: “The other remote contention of the petitioners is that the 2nd respondent (Tinubu) did not score 25 percent or one-quarter of the votes recorded in the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja (FCT); while the petitioners have also tersely alluded to the respondent’s non-qualification, without providing any fact of same in the body of their petitions.”
