President Bola Tinubu and the All Progressives Congress (APC) Tuesday said that the presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP) in the February 25 election, Peter Obi, lacks the legal right to challenge the outcome of the election for not being a member of the party.
Obi and LP in their joint submission alleged that the presidential poll was rigged against him in about 18,088 polling units (totalling over 2.5 million votes), aside alleged over-voting that took place in parts of the South West.
He also alleged that the Independent National Electoral Commission’s failure to upload results to INRC Results Viewing (IREV) portal in real-time negatively impacted the polls.
But the legal team to Tinubu and Senator Kashim Shettima led by Chief Wole Olanipekun urged the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC) to bar Obi from re-contesting if the election is eventually annulled.
They further argued that result upload to the IREV was not compulsory and could not have affected the collation of the results.
Olanipekun also argued that the Court of Appeal, Lagos division, had ruled against the Labour Party that INEC had the discretion on mode of collation of the election results.
He maintained that Obi was not a member of the Labour Party when he ran for the election and therefore has no legal right to institute the case or be allowed to contest rerun.
Also, APC lead counsel, Lateef Fagbemi, equally adopted all the oral arguments of Olanipekun.
Fagbemi said Obi’s petition, though ambitious, did not dispute that accreditation, voting and collation of results did not take place.
He said, “If anybody wants to attack any election results, there has to be polling unit by polling unit proof but this is abysmally lacking in this petition.”
“The much-touted issue of rerun as requested (in the alternative) by Obi should be between Tinubu and the presidential candidate of PDP, Atiku Abubakar.
On their part, the legal representatives of INEC led by Abubakar Mahmoud adopted all his written submissions against Obi’s petition on Tuesday.