President Bola Tinubu has asked the election tribunal to dismiss the petition seeking to nullify his election on the grounds that he did not secure 25% of lawful votes cast in the federal capital territory (FCT).
Tinubu also told the PREPEC that the two petitions filed by candidates of the Labour Party (LP), Peter Obi and his People’s Democratic Party (PDP) counterpart, Atiku Abubakar, seeking the nullification of his victory were not only novel but not familiar with the country’s electoral laws.
The president, whose submissions were contained in his final written address against the two petitions pending at the PREPEC, further said that the petitions of his opponents failed to prove alleged non-compliance and therefore put his actual votes scored at 8,800,369.
However, Atiku and Obi approached the tribunal seeking to upturn Tinubu’s victory.
Tinubu, through his counsel, Wole Olanipekun, in a final written address to the tribunal against the petition, said the FCT is the 37th state for electoral purposes and any other interpretation would “lead to absurdity, chaos, anarchy and alteration of the very intention of the legislature”.
Olanipekun said the petition is novel and not familiar with the country’s electoral laws.
“The petition issue in this address is very novel in the sense that it is not a petition stricto senso, familiar to our electoral jurisprudence, as the petitioners are not, this time around, complaining about election rigging, ballot box snatching, ballot box stuffing, violence, thuggery, vote buying, voters’ intimidation, disenfranchisement, interference by the military or the police, and such other electoral vices,” he said.
Tinubu’s counsel said section 3(1) of the constitution specifically lists the states by their respective names and that the FCT is classified “in the same manner and to the same extent”, hence 25% of votes in the FCT are not required by law.
“May we draw the attention of the court to the fact that there is no punctuation (comma) in the entire section 134(2)(b) of the constitution, particularly, immediately after the ‘States’ and the succeeding ‘and’ connecting the Federal Capital Territory with the States. In essence, the reading of the subsection has to be conjunctive and not disjunctive, as the Constitution clearly makes it so. Pressed further, by this constitutional imperative, the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja, is taken ‘as if’ it is the 37th State, under and by virtue of section 299 of the Constitution.”
