Breaking: Tribunal affirms Francis Nwifuru as winner of Ebonyi guber election

Francis Nwifuru has been declared the winner of the election by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) with 199,131 votes.

With 80,191 votes, Chukwuma Ifeanyi Odii of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) finished in second place.

the vote that was taken on March 18, 2023

However, Odii and PDP disapproved of the result and pledged to contest it.

They then went to the Tribunal to ask for the annulment of Nwifuru’s election due to alleged violations of the Electoral Act of 2022 and failed to receive the majority of valid votes cast in the guber election.

The governor was not eligible to run for office on the APC platform at the time of the election, according to Odii and the PDP legal team, because he was still a member of the People’s Democratic Party.

READ ALSO: Tribunal rejects APGA’s complaint against Ebonyi Gov.

However, the All Progressives Congress (APC), the party of Nwifuru, presented a letter to the Tribunal demonstrating that the governor left the PDP while holding the office of speaker of the state House of Assembly and switched to the APC before to the party’s primary election.

The question of nomination and sponsorship by a political party, being a pre-election subject, should have been contested before the election, according to the three-member panel of the Tribunal chaired by Justice O. Lekan’s ruling on September 27.

The Tribunal then said it did not have the authority to hear the case regarding Nwifuru’s sponsorship of the APC because it was an internal political party affair.

The ruling stated: “Membership of a political party is a non-justiciable issue.”

The Tribunal also criticized the PDP for delaying its appeal of the trial court’s decision and stated that it could not reverse a Federal High Court ruling that stated Nwifuru joined the APC while serving as a lawmaker.

When the petitioners originally asserted that Nwifuru was still their member at the time but then acknowledged he had defected to the APC, the panel noted that “the petitioners were consistently inconsistent.”

Regarding the PDP’s allegation of excessive voting, vote tampering, and inflation of results, the Tribunal noted that the petitioners called 20 witnesses who were unable to establish that the disputed polling unit results sheets were flawed or had not been stamped in accordance with applicable regulations.

The Tribunal noted that the polling unit results provided to the petitioners’ polling unit agents were not produced as proof of alleged electoral fraud.

Lekan asserted, quoting a Supreme Court decision, that overvoting can only be demonstrated using the Voters Register, the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System report, and Form EC8As. “The allegations of the petitioners remain unproven.”

The panel then rejected the case, reiterating Nwifuru’s legitimacy as the state’s legitimately elected governor.

The All Progressive Grand Alliance’s (APGA) petition and Bernard Odoh, its candidate, had previously been denied by the Tribunal on similar reasons.