The efforts of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and the All Progressives Congress, APC, to halt the Allied People’s Movement, APM’s petition challenging his qualification for February 25, 2023, presidential election has been rejected by the Presidential Election Petition Court, PEPC.
This announcement was made on Monday, June 19.
Let’s recall that Tinubu, through his chief counsel, Chief Wole Olanipekun SAN, had requested to use a Supreme Court judgment announced on May 26, to cancel the APM’S petition, but the request was declined.
Tinubu’s bone of contention was that the Apex Court had settled the particular issue that was raised in the petition of the APM through a judgment concluded in the suit filed by the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, respectively.
With that in mind, he had then looked to move the Court to put into effect, the spirit and letters of the Supreme Court judgment to stop the hearing into the APM’s petition.
The Presiding Justice of the Court, But, Justice Haruna Simon Tsammani, the Presiding Justice of the court had however disagreed with Tinubu’s intentions, stating that APM could not possibly be shut out in the face of fair hearing.
Tinubu had then been asked by the Justice to stay his objections about the petition’s hearing until the final court proceedings were concluded.
In my opinion, the PEPC should be applauded for granting APM the right of fair hearing. Due to the dubious nature of court processes on Nigeria, one would have expected for the judgement to be in favour if the ruling party.
Hopefully, this goes to show that there is transparency in the PEPC and in due time, those culprits of the election malpractice would be brought to book and the rightful winner will be announced.
Meanwhile, the APM lawyer had petitioned Justice Tsammani to adjourn proceedings until June 26 in order to obtain crucial documents from INEC but this had been declined by the court which instead fixed Wednesday, June 22 for the hearing petition.
