The presidential election petition tribunal on Wednesday has ruled on Peter Obi’s motion to cancel the result of the 2023 presidential election over allegations of corrupt practices and overvoting.
The motion has been dismissed by PEPT. The court said petitioners have failed to establish their allegations of overvoting and voter suppression.
Haruna Tsammani, chairman of the tribunal, on Wednesday, dismissed the petition.
It’s his third motion to be struck out by the court.
Obi in his petition had asked the court to either declare him the winner of the election or order a fresh poll.
On the issue of securing 25% of votes in the federal capital territory (FCT), the tribunal said the petitioners’ interpretation of Section 134(2)(b) of the 1999 constitution is “completely fallacious — if not outrightly ridiculous”.
PEPC says the use of “and” doesn’t imply anything special as submitted by Peter Obi of the Labour Party.
The court further added that section 134 (2) A & B of the constitution only refers to the FCT as one of the 36 States of the federation.
According to the tribunal, the preamble of the Constitution clearly shows the equality of all Nigerians irrespective of where they live and that votes in FCT was not superior to votes in other states.
The judge said the provisions of the Constitution shall apply to the FCT as if it were one of the states.
The court also ruled that Peter Obi, candidate of the Labour Party (LP), could not establish that INEC deliberately failed to upload results to the IReV in order to manipulate the election result in favour of Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the February polls.
Tsammani added that the petitioners did not prove how they were affected by the failure of INEC to electronically transmit the results.
