The Labour Party and Peter Obi, its presidential candidate, have once more urged the Presidential Election Petition Court to overturn President Bola Tinubu’s victory.
Tinubu and Vice President Kashim Shettma, according to the party and Obi, were not eligible to run for office.
They further claim that Tinubu should not have been proclaimed the winner of the election even though he received less than 25% of the vote in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).
These were their justifications in their final written statement in response to Tinubu and Shettima’s combined statement asking for the petition filed by the Labour Party and its candidate to be dismissed.
Obi and his party emphasized that INEC’s claimed failure to electronically transmit the results of the presidential election from the polling places to its results viewing webpage constituted to non-compliance in their argument that INEC did not comply with the Electoral Act and other associated rules.
The Labour Party and its candidate claimed that they did a much better job of proving their case than the All Progressives Congress (APC), calling 13 witnesses and submitting volumes of papers as opposed to one witness each from INEC, Tinubu, and Shettima and none from the APC.
They also contend that Tinubu’s purported involvement in forfeiture proceedings in a United States District Court was sufficient for INEC to deem him ineligible to run for office.
In light of Tinubu’s failure to garner 25% of the vote in the FCT, the Labour Party and Obi both contended that it was improper for INEC to proclaim Tinubu the winner.
They came to the conclusion that either the FCT is only a state, along with Nigeria’s other 36 states, where the victorious candidate must have received at least 25% of the vote in two-thirds of the states (37 states), or receiving 25% of the vote in the FCT is a separate requirement for election to the office of president.
“Hence, the deliberate amendment of the drafters of the 1999 Constitution, to include the additional requirement of 25 percent votes in the FCT must not be rendered redundant as it is possible that the drafters intended that the popularity of the winning candidate must extend not only to an appreciable geographical spread, but also to the FCT being the capital city and melting pot for all Nigerians and which would truly reflect the will of all Nigerians.”
They finally urged the court to uphold their petition and grants their reliefs.