How Frivolous Can a Suit Be?

Notes for File

Last week, the news was everywhere that the presidential candidate of the Hope Democratic Party (HDP), in the 2019 elections, Ambrose Owuru, had approached the Court of Appeal in Abuja seeking to stop the inauguration of the President-elect, Bola Tinubu, as president.

Owuru, who said he contested the 2019 presidential election, added that he was not satisfied with the way and manner the Supreme Court resolved the case. He later went to the Federal High Court in Abuja and asked the court to declare the president’s seat vacant and swear him in as the authentic winner.

However, in January, the court dismissed the suit, describing it as “baseless, frivolous, irritating, and vexatious in its entirety.”

In a suit marked CA/CV/259/2023, Owuru urged the Appeal Court to prohibit President Muhammadu Buhari; the Attorney-General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami and INEC from going ahead with Tinubu’s inauguration. He argued that he was the winner of the 2019 presidential election and had not spent his tenure.

Owuru maintained that Buhari has been usurping his tenure of office since 2019 because the Supreme Court has not determined his petition challenging the election’s outcome. He applied for “an order of prohibitory injunction compelling Buhari, AGF, and INEC, their servants, agents, and privies to preserve and give due cognisance and abstain from any further undertaking or engaging in any act of usurpation of adjudged acquired constitutional rights and mandate as the winner of the 2019 presidential election.”

He also applied for another order directing and placing on notice that any form of handover inauguration, organised and superintended by Buhari on May 29 outside the adjudged winner of the 2019 presidential election, subject of the pending appeal, remains and is viewed as an “interim place holder.”

An eight-paragraph affidavit in support of the suit is also asking the appellate court to give it an expeditious hearing before the inauguration of Tinubu.

While it is within Owuru’s rights to go to court, does he not think that his request is strange, frivolous and a waste of the time of the courts? Was he not in the country when INEC conducted the February 25 presidential election and declared Tinubu victorious?

Is it not surprising that he is asking the court to stop Tinubu’s inauguration when he did not even participate in the election where Tinubu emerged victorious? Doesn’t he think that the current suit is frivolous and an academic exercise?