Tribunal reserves judgement in Obi, LP’s petition

The Presidential Election Petition Court sitting in Abuja, on Tuesday, August 1, 2023, reserved judgement in a petition filed by the Labour Party (LP) and its presidential candidate, Peter Obi, challenging the election of President Bola Tinubu.

Obi and LP are petitioners in the petition marked CA/PEPC/03/2023 challenging the election which brought Tinubu into power

The respondents are the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), President Tinubu, Vice president Kashim Shettima, and All Progressives Congress (APC).

The five-member panel presided over by Justice Haruna Tsammani reserved judgement to a date that will be communicated to parties after parties adopted their final written addresses.

Following the closing of the cases of the respondents on July 5, time was given to parties to file their written addresses.

Adopting their final written addresses filed on July 14, the lead counsel for INEC, Abubakar Mahmoud, SAN, urged the court to uphold their objections and take the petition as lacking in merit and should be dismissed.

Mohamund said there are five issues listed but he would speak on two.

One of them according to Mohamund was the non compliance and the conduct of the election conducted by INEC.

According to him all these revolves in the use of technology and the petitioners totally misunderstood what was used, that is the Bimodal voters accredited (BVAs) and IreV portal.

He argued that the evidence before the court showed clearly that the first respondent made sure technology was deployed for election.

The two points of disagreement he said were the contrivation in the minds of the petitioners that electronic collation of the results manually system was carried out.

He added that the petitioners failed to present evidence to support their allegation on electronic collation of any of the election results.

Mahmoud argued further that the petitioners alleged that the glitches that occurred during the election was orchestrated to manipulate the result of the election.

The Star