President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Vice President Kashim Shettima are asking the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal (PEPT) to disregard claims by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), the Labour Party (LP) and their Presidential candidates, Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi, that it is mandatory for a candidate to score 25 per cent of votes in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) to be declared President.
Tinubu and Shettima insist that such claims could have been as a result of either their misreading of the Constitution or their miscomprehension of the relevant provisions of the nation’s ground norm.
This is part of their arguments in two sets of final written addresses filed on the petitions by Atiku/PDP and Obi/LP against the outcome of the February 25 presidential election.
The Nation learnt that the two final addresses were filed on Friday by the Tinubu/Shettima legal team, led by Chief Wole Olanipekun, SAN.
Describing both petitions as strange and hollow, Tinubu and Shettima argued that neither of the two sets of petitions provided relevant evidence to support the claims of the plaintiffs that the election was not held in compliance with relevant laws or that the presidential and vice presidential candidates of the APC were not qualified to contest the election.
The defendants said the suits could not even be considered as petitions within the context of the nation’s electoral laws as they were strangely not “complaining about election rigging, ballot box snatching, ballot box stuffing, violence, thuggery, vote buying, voters’ intimidation, disenfranchisement, interference by the military or the police, and such other electoral vices.”
“The crux of their grouse, in their petitions, is that this time around, while the presidential election was peacefully conducted all over the country (as corroborated by their primary witnesses; that is, the Presiding Officers (POs) and the results accurately recorded in the various Form EC8As, some unidentified results were not uploaded electronically to the INEC Election Result Viewing (IREV) portal,” Tinubu and Shettima said.
Continuing, they said: “The other remote contention of the petitioners is that the 2nd respondent (Tinubu) did not score 25 per cent or one-quarter of the votes recorded in the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja (FCT); while the petitioners have also tersely alluded to the respondent’s non-qualification, without providing any fact of same in the body of their petitions.”
They submitted that the petitioners failed woefully to establish their claims with adequate and relevant evidence as required by law.
Tinubu said he won the election with 8,794,726 votes ahead of Atiku/PDP, “who were his closest rival, though trailing at a distance with the total of 6,984,520 votes,” and Obi/LP “came a distant third with a total of 6,101,533 votes.”
Besides, the defendants said while they polled more than 25 per cent of the total votes cast in 29 states, Atiku secured same in 21 states, while Obi got 25 per cent in only 16 states and the FCT.
They added that it was ironical that while Atiku, who scored 16.13 per cent of the votes cast in the FCT, as against Tinubu’s19.76 per cent score in the same territory, is not only seeking to be declared the winner of the election, he also wants Tinubu’s victory voided on the grounds that he (Tinubu) did not score 25 per cent of the votes cast in the FCT.
@The Nation
