APC Joins INEC in Urging Tribunal to Dismiss Atiku, PDP’s Petition

Alex Enumah in Abuja

The ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) on Wednesday joined the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in calling for the dismissal of the petition filed by the major opposition party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and its candidate, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, challenging the declaration of its candidate, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, as winner of the February 25 presidential election.

APC, in a preliminary objection to the petition, claimed that the tribunal has no jurisdiction to adjudicate on the petition on the grounds that it lacks the necessary facts or particulars as required by law.

In its reply to the petition of Atiku and PDP, the APC through its lead counsel, Prince Lateef Fagbemi (SAN), submitted that the ‘petitioners’ paragraph 146 in support of Ground 4 on non-qualification is vague, bare and meaningless as having the constitutional threshold is not part of the requirement to contest an election.

On the issue of non-compliance, the APC argued that the failure of the petitioners to plead with specificity the particulars in terms of names, codes and/or polling units where the alleged malpractices, non-compliance and irregularities took place is a fundamental violation of the Electoral Act, 2022, which fact renders the petition incompetent and an abuse of court process.

“Petition as presently constituted is devoid of necessary particulars/information to support allegation of corrupt practices, violence and non-compliance with provisions of the Electoral Act.

“The petition discloses no reasonable cause of action; having regard to the paucity of the facts pleaded to be relied upon in proof of each of the 4 grounds on which the petition is premised,” the APC submitted.

On the controversy surrounding the deployment of the Bi-modal Verification Accreditation System (BVAS) and the Result Viewing Portal (iRev), the APC observed that there is no provision in the operative law governing the conduct of elections in Nigeria that makes it mandatory for presiding officers to electronically transmit/transfer results from the polling units directly to INEC’s collation system, adding that there is no provision that makes it mandatory for the presiding officer to use the BVAS to upload a scanned copy of the Form EC8A to the iRev in real time. 

Like INEC, APC claimed that Tinubu need not obtain 25 per cent of the votes cast in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) to be entitled to be declared winner of the election.

The party subsequently urged the tribunal to dismiss Atiku and PDP’s petition for being incompetent and lacking in merit.