The All Progressives Congress has asked the Court of Appeal in Abuja to dismiss a petition by Peter Obi of the Labour Party who is challenging the victory of Bola Tinubu following the presidential election of Feb. 25.
Inec declared Tinubu winner with 37% of the votes cast, ahead of Atiku’s 29% and 25% for Obi. No court has overturned presidential election results in Nigeria before.
Obi and the Peoples Democratic Party’s (PDP) Atiku Abubakar have separately challenged the results in court, saying the results were fraudulent.
The APC said in a countersuit on Tuesday that Obi’s petition should be dismissed on several grounds, including that Obi was not a Labour Party member when he contested the elections and that he failed to include Atiku as a respondent, making his petition “incompetent.”
Obi left the PDP in May last year to join the Labour Party. The APC is arguing that Obi was not yet a member when LP submitted its members register to the electoral commission as required by law.
The ruling party is yet to respond to Atiku’s petition. Tinubu is set to be sworn-in end of May.
The Court of Appeal, which is the first election tribunal for the presidential election, is still to nominate judges who will constitute a tribunal to hear the presidential election petitions and deliver a verdict within 180 days from the date the court challenges were filed last month.
INEC too
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has also asked the appeals court to Obi’s petition.
Inec’s petition filed by its lawyer, Abubakar Mahmoud, asked the commission to either “dismiss or strike out the petition for being grossly incompetent, abusive, vague, nebulous, generic, general, non-specific, ambiguous, equivocal, hypothetical and academic,” according to the News Agency of Nigeria.
Obi’s petition against Inec is hinged on the commission’s failure to upload results electronically as stated in its guidelines.
The Labour Party candidate also argues that Tinubu “was not duly elected by majority of the lawful votes cast at the time of the election” saying there was rigging in 11 states.
Inec argued that the grounds on which the petition was based were “defective.”
It said the claim that Tinubu was not not elected by majority of lawful votes was defective for failure to plead the alleged unlawful votes to be deducted from Tinubu, and/or lawful votes to be credited to Obi.
Inec also said Obi’s prayer to be declared winner was defective because he did not join necessary parties in the case.
According to Inec, Obi and the Labour Party did not have agents in all the polling units across Nigeria as they only submitted a list of 134, 874 polling agents which is 41, 972 short of the 176, 846 polling units across Nigeria.
Inec also argued that Kashim Shettima, the vice president-elect, was duly nominated and sponsored to contest the election.
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