How Peter Obi failed to prove 2023 presidential election was rigged, Tinubu, Shettima give final response to tribunal

…Ask Court To Bar Obi From Rerun If Election Is Cancelled

THE WHISTLER

The legal team of President Bola Tinubu and Vice President Kashim Shettima led by Chief Wole Olanipekun, SAN, has submitted its final written address against the petition of the presidential candidate of the Labour Party, Peter Obi, before the Presidential Election Petition Court.

In it, Tinubu and Shettima’s team explained how Obi “woefully failed” to discharge the burden of proof binding on him to show that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) rigged the polls in their client’s favour on February 25.

Tinubu, through his lawyers, maintained that the petitioners called a total of 13 witnesses against his election victory, alleging their evidence and testimonies were characterized by hearsay and irrelevance that would convince the court to void his victory.

In the alternative, his legal team said if the election would by cancelled by the court as requested by Obi, then he should be barred from contesting the rerun having allegedly violated several electoral laws including the period he joined the LP from the Peoples Demcocratic Party, PDP.

Recall that on March 1, INEC’s Chairman Professor Mahmood Yakubu announced Tinubu as winner of the polls with 8,794,726 votes while Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi of the Labour Party were said to have scored 6,984,520 votes and 6,101,533 votes, respectively.

Afterward, Obi and LP challenged the outcome of the election on March 20 by filing a petition seeking the nullification of the declaration of Bola Tinubu as president-elect, and listing several grounds against the president and INEC.

On ground one, the petitioners’ legal team led by Dr. Livy Uzoukwu SAN alleged that Tinubu should be disqualified from the election over a United District Court judgement which forced him to forfeit 460,000 US dollars suspected to be proceeds of drug trafficking, adding that Shettima knowingly allowed himself to be nominated as the Vice Presidential candidate to Tinubu when he was still a senatorial candidate for the Borno Central Constituency at the time the APC held its presidential primary election in July 2022.

On Ground 2, they alleged that the election of Tinubu should be declared invalid by reason of corrupt practices or non-compliance with the provisions of the Electoral Act 2022, insisting that it cannot stand because INEC made the deployment of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System machine mandatory for the accreditation of voters and real-time uploading of results but failed to do so on election day, contrary to the electoral umpire’s own laws and regulations.

On ground 3, Obi claimed that Tinubu was not duly elected by majority of the lawful votes cast during the presidential election and did not get 25 percent of the votes cast in the Federal Capital Territory as required by Section 134 of the 1999 Constitution which reads: “(1) A candidate for an election to the office of President shall be deemed to have been duly elected, where, there being only two candidates for the election – (a) he has the majority of votes cast at the election; and (b) he has not less than one-quarter of the votes cast at the election in each of at least two-thirds of all the States in the Federation and the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja.”