President Bola Tinubu will respond to all petitions seeking his removal from office on June 30. This was revealed as the Presidential Election Petition Court, PEPC, in Abuja, announced that all three petitioners before it would close their cases on Friday.
Former Vice President and candidate for the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Alhaji Atiku Abubakar; former governor of Anambra State and candidate for the Labour Party (LP), Mr. Peter Obi; and the Allied Peoples Movement (APM) are those who are contesting the declaration of Tinubu of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) as the winner of the presidential election held on February 25.
The APM is requesting that the court nullify all of the votes belonging to Tinubu “in light of his non-qualification,” even though Atiku and Obi have each claimed separately that they won the presidential election.
According to Sections 131(c) and 142 of the 1999 Constitution, as amended, Tinubu’s candidature was declared invalid by APM because Mr. Ibrahim Masari withdrew after being initially nominated as the APC’s vice presidential candidate.
The Certificate of Return that Tinubu received from the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) is being withdrawn by all petitioners.
Obi said he would call 50 witnesses, while the APM, which claimed its case was supported by documentary evidence, said it would call only one witness to support its claims. In contrast, Atiku, through his team of attorneys led by Chief Chris Uche, SAN, told the court that he would invite 100 witnesses to support his claims.
The five-member panel, which was presided over by Justice Haruna Tsammani, had consolidated all the petitions on May 23 while also giving the parties involved three weeks to make their cases.
The court extended the deadline by two more days, even though the petitioners were supposed to wrap up their case on Tuesday based on a pre-hearing report that had been issued by the panel.
Atiku has already called 25 witnesses, whereas Obi has only so far called seven witnesses and presented numerous documentary exhibits to the court.
When the matter came up on Tuesday, Atiku’s lawyer, Uche, SAN, told the court that his client may call five more witnesses to have a round figure of 30 witnesses.
He emphasised that some of the documents they planned to submit in the coming days would deal with the testimony of the other 70 witnesses.
However, Uche, SAN, bemoaned that despite the court’s appeal for a cooperative attitude, INEC continued to make it challenging for his client to obtain Certified True Copies, CTC, of the documents he requested.
He added that his client requested Form EC8A series, which are polling unit results for all 36 states and the FCT, but had received only 14 batches so far, and that requesting documents from INEC was like requesting weapons from an adversary in a war.
He testified before the court that the INEC forms that his team was given were also not properly organised.
Atiku’s attorney convinced the court to adjourn the case to Wednesday so that his team could prepare a schedule for easy identification of the documents to be tendered in evidence, even though the matter had initially been put on hold for 10 minutes to allow for the sorting out of the documents.
“ There is nothing before us to show that the application was made to the RECs. We are not here to play by sentiments,” a member of the panel, Uzoukwu, SAN, said.
In the meantime, Mr. Lawrence Bayode, a Deputy Director of INEC’s ICT Department who also showed up in response to the second subpoena issued to the Commission’s Chairman, informed the court that he had two of the five documents the petitioners had requested.
Further hearings on the petitions were postponed until Wednesday by the panel headed by Justice Tsammani.