The Supreme Court has deferred its judgment on the appeal lodged by the Labour Party’s presidential candidate, Mr. Peter Obi, challenging the outcome of the February 25 presidential election.
A seven-member panel of the Supreme Court, headed by Justice Inyang Okoro, scheduled the case for judgment after all parties had presented their arguments.
Obi and the Labour Party, represented by their legal team led by Dr. Livy Uzoukwu, SAN, urged the court to uphold their appeal and overturn the judgment of the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC), which dismissed their petition. On the other hand, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), President Bola Tinubu, and the All Progressives Congress (APC) asked the court to dismiss the appeal for lack of merit.
The panel has announced that it will inform all parties of the judgment date. In his 51-point appeal, Obi, who came in third place in the election, argued that the PEPC panel had erred in law and reached an erroneous conclusion when it rejected his petition. He claimed that the panel incorrectly evaluated the evidence he presented and resulted in a miscarriage of justice by stating that he did not specify the polling units where irregularities occurred during the election.
Obi and the LP also criticized the PEPC for dismissing their case on the grounds that they did not specify the numbers of votes or scores that were allegedly manipulated in favor of President Tinubu and the APC. They accused the PEPC, led by Justice Haruna Tsammani, of making legal mistakes when it relied on paragraph 4(1) (d) (2) and 54 of the First Schedule to the Electoral Act 2022 to strike out paragraphs of the petition.
Obi alleged that the lower court had violated his right to a fair hearing and that the evidence provided by his witnesses was incorrectly disregarded as incompetent. He told the Supreme Court that the panel unjustly dismissed his claim that INEC uploaded 18,088 blurry results on its IReV portal.
Moreover, Obi alleged that the lower court disregarded his claim that certified true copies of documents issued by INEC to his legal team contained 8,123 blurred results, including blank A4 papers, pictures, and images of unknown individuals, falsely representing them as CTCs of polling unit results from the presidential election.
Obi argued that the court below had erred in law and had resulted in a miscarriage of justice when it held and concluded that he failed to prove allegations of corrupt practices and over-voting. He claimed it was wrong for the lower court to use the legal principle of estoppel to dismiss his contention that INEC bypassed its own regulations by refusing to electronically transmit election results from polling units to the IReV.
The appellants stated, “The petitioners provided credible and substantial evidence, both oral and documentary, that demonstrated substantial non-compliance with the Electoral Act 2022 by the Respondents in conducting the election. The court below overlooked that the Respondents failed to disprove the evidence of substantial non-compliance presented by the petitioners.”
Additionally, Obi insisted that the PEPC had disregarded evidence that President Tinubu had previously been indicted and fined $460,000 in the USA in connection with a drug-related case.
RHe further argued in his appeal that the imposition of a fine is not limited to a criminal conviction and encompasses civil forfeiture, according to legal terminology