The Presidential Election Petition Tribunal on Wednesday dismissed Peter Obi and Labour Party’s petitions challenging the victory of President Bola Tinubu in the last presidential election.
The tribunal described the petitions as unmeritorious.
The Justice Haruna Tsammani-led five-member panel dismissed all Obi’s petitions seeking to truncate Tinubu’s victory.
The tribunal held that 10 out of 13 witnesses of Obi were not competent to testify as they were not frontloaded in compliance with the law.
The tribunal also said the European Union (EU) report on the outcome of the 2023 election was inadmissible and that it needed to be tendered by EU, the author of the document.
According to the court, the reports tendered by Obi’s expert witnesses were useless, while it also said the US court forfeiture of Tinubu’s $460,000 did not disqualify him from running for the presidency, as the forfeiture was a simple civil matters.
Justice Tsammani added that failure of INEC to upload the copies of polling unit results to IReV real time did not invalidate the election and that INEC is not bound to transmit election results electronically.
More so, the Tribunal said there was no evidence to show that INEC deliberately refused to upload copies of polling unit results to IReV to manipulate it, as alleged by Obi and Labour Party.
The Tribunal also said Obi failed to prove the allegations that INEC failed to comply with the Electoral Act in the conduct of the election.
Justice Tsammani stated that Obi and LP had no solid evidence to back allegations of suppression of votes, wrong computation of results, manipulation of results, and inflation of results, corrupt practices.
The court added that insistence that Tinubu must win 25 per cent of votes in the FCT is a parochial interpretation of section 134(2) of the Nigerian constitution and also fallacious.
