Tinubu: ‘Grossly Incompetent, Abusive, Vague’ — INEC Begs Tribunal To Strike Out Peter Obi’s Petitions

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has made a request to the presidential election petition tribunal to dismiss the petition submitted by the Labour Party (LP) and its presidential candidate, Peter Obi. Owing that the petition was against the declaration of Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu as the President-elect.

Freshreporters Media reports that in its petition marked CA/PEPC/03/2023, Livy Ozoukwu, lead counsel to Labour Party and Peter Obi, contended that Tinubu “was not duly elected by the majority of the lawful votes cast at the time of the election.”

Peter Obi and the Labour Party alleged that Shettima had a double nomination, which goes against the provisions of the Electoral Act. They also accused INEC of rigging and manipulating the February 25th presidential election.

Furthermore, they argued that INEC disregarded its regulations by announcing the election results before the full scanning, uploading, and electronic transmission of the polling unit results, as stipulated by the electoral act.

In response to these claims, Abubakar Mahmoud, who represented INEC, stated that the relief sought by Peter Obi and the Labour Party was not viable and could not be granted.

He asked the election tribunal to either “dismiss or strike out the petition for being grossly incompetent, abusive, vague, nebulous, generic, general, non-specific, ambiguous, equivocal, hypothetical and academic.”

INEC discredited the petitioners’ claim that Tinubu did not win the majority of lawful votes, calling their grounds for the petition vague. The commission argued that the petitioners’ prayer to declare Obi as the winner based on the majority of lawful votes was defective, as they failed to join necessary parties and lacked the requisite particulars to support their claim.

Moreover, INEC stated that Obi could not be declared the winner since he did not obtain the majority of the lawful votes cast at the election or secure one-quarter of the votes cast in at least two-thirds of all states in Nigeria and the FCT.

The commission said Obi could not be returned as elected “not having polled majority of the lawful votes cast at the election and /or secured one-quarter of the votes cast at the election in each of at least two-thirds of all states in the federation and the FCT.”

The electoral body also revealed that the Labour Party and Peter Obi did not have polling agents in all polling units across Nigeria. They only submitted a list of 134,874 polling agents, which falls short of the required number of 176,846 polling units across the country.