BUSINESS HALLMARK
Given that no presidential election has ever been overturned by the court in Nigeria, not many Nigerians would have expected a different outcome, when five justices of the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal (PEPT) sat on Wednesday, to deliver judgment on petitions filed by Mr. Peter Obi of the Labour Party and Alhaji Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), challenging the declaration of President Bola Tinubu as winner of the February 25 presidential election by the Independent National Electoral (INEC).
But given the manner in which the election was conducted, with glaring infractions recorded in places like Rivers State, Lagos, among others, where results were visibly rewritten, with sheets eventually uploaded to INEC portal mutilated and different from those from polling units in many instances, many would have been curious to know the argument the justices would proffer to validate the outcome, and since the judgement was read on Wednesday, with the five judges unanimously upholding Tinubu’s victory, controversies have not been in short supply, amid questions about the arguments proffered by the justices, even as some have suggested that the legal teams of the litigants did shoddy jobs.
The PAN Niger Delta Elders Forum (PANDEF), for instance, argued on Friday that the legal teams of Obi and Atiku did not do a good job in the presidential election matter they handled, an argument also pushed by Liborous Oshoma, a legal practitioner and analyst.
“For an ordinary man, who is not a lawyer, what we saw and witnessed yesterday seems to be sound and the statements that the judges made were explicit that even the ordinary man will understand that the petitioners did not do a good job,” Ken Robinson, national publicity secretary of PANDEF said on Friday.
Making similar argument, Jesutega Onokpasa, a member of the dissolved APC Presidential Campaign Council, noted that, “Peter Obi, who kept asking for adjournment, wasted his time in court and the court’s time. He couldn’t provide substantial evidence to back his allegations.”
Onokpasa’s argument resonates with the prevailing sentiments in the ruling party’s camp, where many have since gone to town to celebrate the verdict as an affirmation of the credibility of Tinubu’s victory, but the judgment has raised several issues, too, and the opposition has picked several holes in it, amid suggestions that it may have been influenced by the ruling party.
“The judgment on the Labour Party’s petition appears to be a direct reproduction of APC’s final address at the tribunal. When will this noble profession jettison technicality for justice?” wondered Valentine Ozigbo, a chieftain of the Labour Party.
“For the record, Labour Party presented an exceptional case, one that far outshone the efforts of the APC lawyers. It’s not HE Peter Obi and LP that lost; it’s Nigeria and Nigerians. If we allow this skewed judgment to stand, then we are not only setting a dangerous precedent but are also rendering our judiciary irrelevant.”
