From Romanus Ugwu, Abuja
The few days of temporary honeymoon enjoyed by President-elect, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, since his return from a 34-day rest in France will be short-lived as the legal fireworks commences at the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal (PEPT) in Abuja, this week.
It will also be the same temporal relief and reprieve recently enjoyed by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) after being subjected to psychological torture and unending severe criticisms since it announced the candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) as the winner of the February 25 presidential election.
From all indications, both the President-elect and the electoral umpire will, this week, dominate political discourse in the country as they return to the election petition tribunal to defend the plethora of allegations levelled against them during and after the conduct of the presidential poll.
Shortly after the March 1 declaration of Tinubu as the winner of the February 25 presidential poll, five aggrieved political parties and their candidates challenged the results declared by INEC in favour of the APC presidential candidate.
The five political parties and their candidates, comprising Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku Abubakar, Labour Party (LP), Peter Obi, Action Alliance (AA) Solomon Okangbuan, Allied Peoples Movement (APM) and its candidate, Chichi Ojei, and their Action Peoples Party (APP) counterpart, filed their petitions against INEC, the President-elect, Tinubu and his political platform, the APC within the time frame allowed by the law.
While the first petition was filed by the AA, Okangbuan, with suit number CA/PEPC/01/2023 against Tinubu’s declaration of President-elect on March 16, the second petitioner, APP filed its own on March 19.
They were trailed by the APM candidate, Ojei, with suit number: CA/PEPC/03/2023; before the LP presidential candidate, in a suit marked: CA/PEPC/04/2023, filed its petition the same day. Atiku’s petition was filed exactly 21 days after Tinubu was the declared President-elect.
The gladiators will this week take turns to defend their claims to victory, their grievances, and legal requests against the conduct of the February 25 presidential election before the presidential election tribunal.
With a striking semblance, the major contenders in the suit, Obi, Atiku, and others are praying for the Election Tribunal to completely nullify INEC’s declaration of the candidate of APC, Asiwaju, as the winner of the February 25 election.
They are insisting that apart from the failure of the President-elect to meet the contentious compulsory 25 per cent votes in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Abuja, the APC candidate should be disqualified based on multiple breaches of sundry legal infractions in the amended 2023 Electoral Act.
Though today’s legal proceedings would basically be a house cleaning exercise to settle pending applications after which a timetable would be drawn for the hearing of the substantive petitions, curiously, apprehensions, certain utterances, and observations from imminent Nigerians, have contributed to heightening the hitherto calm political tension in the country ahead of this month’s presidential inauguration.
One of such comments was the recent one from the Emeritus Bishop of Abuja Catholic Archdiocese, Cardinal John Onaiyekan, who suggested that the law court should dispose off pending election suits before swearing in the President-elect, Asiwaju.
Declaring that swearing in Tinubu before the Tribunal’s verdict ‘doesn’t make sense, Cardinal Onaiyekan had argued that there is a need to review the election process, to make it easier for a winner to emerge, be sworn in and people to rally around him.
His words; “there are cases in court that have not been disposed of. That is why we are in an anomalous situation. We have a President-elect whose election is being challenged and the court is handling it. I am still waiting for the court to tell me who won the election.
“It doesn’t make much sense to be swearing in people when they are still in court. I know it has happened with governors, but the outcome has not been the best of all cases. I think we need to review our election process, so we do have a winner who will be sworn in and who everybody would rally around.
“It is a pity that it is taking longer for the court to come to its decision. My problem is that the whole system of our election must be properly reviewed so that it would be easier for winners to emerge according to the wishes of the people. It is not right to have a system that is constantly contested. We should find out why every election is being contested,” Onaiyekan expresses worry, heightening the tension ahead of the legal fireworks this week.
Expectedly, backlashes have continued to trail his comment with the Minister of State for Labour and Employment, Festus Keyamo, and former Aviation Minister, Femi Fani-Kayode taking a swipe at the clergy.
In a statement on his verified Twitter handle, Keyamo derided; “Dear daddy Onaiyekan, you know we all respect you a lot, but your political comments are becoming unstatesmanlike. A statesman who doubles as a Man of God should strive to be fair to all. You didn’t say the same thing when Obasanjo, Yar’Adua, Jonathan, and Buhari were all sworn in as Presidents when their cases were still before the courts.
“You have chosen to single out this President-elect this time around because the candidate you and your other religious brethren openly supported lost the election and you all feel humiliated and embarrassed. All issues raised against the victory of Tinubu in court now (whether it is 25 per cent votes in FCT or the fake drug issue, etc), are not different from issues raised previously against him because basically, the complaints have always been that the declared victor did not win the election fair and square or was not qualified to contest the election.
“…so, why all the fuse now? It has always been our electoral template since 1999 for the declared winners to be sworn into office in order to avoid a vacuum and not to foist an unconstitutional contraption on the system whilst the cases are in court.
“My dear daddy, may I respectfully advise that going forward, you and your brethren may consider stepping back from the deep and murky waters of politics and desist from descending into the arena of political conflicts where your children in your congregations find themselves on different sides of political divides, so it would be unfair to them for you to openly take sides.
“The embarrassment to the Body of Christ is getting too much and no politician is worth dragging this dignified body into unnecessary political controversy. Is this too much to ask, Daddy?” Keyamo quipped sarcastically.
Equally tackling Cardinal Onaiyekan, Fani-Kayode, wrote; “Those that are filled with bitterness, hate, envy, fury, and rage and that seek to pursue us into the Red Sea as we make our way to the Promise Land shall be drowned by it.”
However, former federal lawmaker, Senator Shehu Sani, expressed shock over what he termed “toxic comments” from some chieftains of the APC against the Archbishop Emeritus of Abuja Catholic Archdiocese. Reacting to the backlashes, Shehu Sani, in a tweet, wondered why those condemning supporters of the LP presidential candidate, Obi, over violence, are also doing the same.
He wrote, “I thought it was only Peter’s supporters that harass people for their opinions until I read such toxic comments against John Onaiyekan. Those who preach tolerance should practise tolerance.”
But, regardless of whichever perception anybody wants to interpret the stand of the clergyman on the controversial 2023 presidential election, what is obvious is that legal fireworks may be INEC’s fresh albatross capable of forcing the commission once again to the slaughter slab to defend its controversial decisions during the poll.
Most pundits are already of the opinion that the outcome of the presidential election which throws INEC into a serious dilemma, will make it difficult to wriggle out, especially the general perception that it failed to live up to its repeated promises and expectations of many Nigerians.
“The dilemma INEC currently finds itself is that even if it successfully justified the outcome of the general election, especially the presidential poll that produced Tinubu, it may be difficult to disentangle itself from the negative public perception it created,” an aggrieved chieftain of APC told Daily Sun in confidence.
Expressing his bitterness and anger against the commission, the governor of Abia State, Okezie Ikpeazu, shortly after the election and while enumerating INEC’s sins, lamented that the commission defrauded Nigerians with the deceptive technology it used to conduct the election.
Insisting that INEC’s successful defence of its declared results in court will not vitiate the impression against the commission, Governor Ikpeazu said that 2019 election is incomparable with 2023.
“The difference is that in the 2019 election, you could see and track rigging. But in 2023, they put the rigging beyond what you can see. People are left more frustrated than they were in 2019. In 2023, you don’t need to carry ballot boxes. All you need is to have a pen and a few friends in INEC.
“In 2019, if somebody is rigging the election, you will see the person and you can shout. The jurisprudence of election litigations will be very interesting this time around. Let’s see what happens. But here again, when facts and figures are hidden inside the computer, leaving the right to retrieve such facts and figures in the hands of one man, you can imagine. I don’t know how it will be.
“I blame Nigerians. We spent a whole lot of time glorifying what we didn’t completely understand. What I expected, especially from our young ones, is that a deeper interrogation of the shortcomings of BVAS would have been brought to the fore.
“I am not a very strong person in terms of ICT, but those who know it would have just walked up to us to say, this thing cannot do what they are saying it will do and we take it up from there. Nigerians going forward should henceforth interrogate some of the stories they sell to us.
“Expectations were very high and people thought we had it covered end to end but you can now see that it’s not so. I don’t know how we can pick up from here. I encourage Nigerians to remain resolute. If we had interrogated properly and asked the right questions, we would not be here,” he lamented.
Specifically faulting the deployment of BVAS and IReV technology, Governor Ikpeazu said: “If I want to be frank, I am one of the people that the BVAS deceived. I am one of the people who believed the stories around BVAS. Yes, you asked in what way, I will say because of all the advertisements about BVAS, the human element and interference in the entire process is still above 90 per cent.
“We thought BVAS was a super technology, but it’s nothing. They have taken it to a point where somebody sits back to say I feel like I should look at the BVAS but under a different circumstance, the same person will say I don’t feel like looking at the BVAS now or the results are still being uploaded. If you look at the scenarios, you see opportunities for people to be mischievous.
“Unfortunately also, characters within INEC advised some of the ad-hoc staff not to bother about the BVAS so some of us believe that there was something like that. From our situation room, what we get and the tumbling results that eventually manifested on the result sheets did not tally. It’s a monumental fraud,” he emphatically condemned.
However, dismissing the negative impressions many Nigerians hold about BVAS and IReV machines uploading results real-time, National Commissioner and Chairman Information and Voter Education Committee, Festus Okoye, accused Nigerians of displaying ignorance of the requirements of the Electoral Act.
He frowned at the criticisms that INEC disappointed many Nigerians and the international community in the conduct of the 2023 general election, arguing in a telephone chat with Daily Sun that; “it is wrong to judge, analyse, and evaluate an entire electoral process only from the point of view of the commission’s inability to upload polling units level results real-time. That is not what the election is all about.
“I have repeatedly made it clear that the election collation process in Nigeria remains manual. It has never changed and it will not change. There is a huge misunderstanding of our promise to upload polling unit results real-time. People are thinking that these uploads will be at all levels of the collation process, but it is not true.
“What the statute says is that uploading can only be done at the first level of collation which is at Ward Collation Centres and that the uploaded results are of no consequence unless there is a dispute. It specifically stipulated that collation is manual but if there is a dispute, the IReV will be used to resolve the disputed areas,” Okoye clarified.
He also said though it has not officially evaluated the volume of court cases instituted against the commission, the impression that all election cases in the court concern the commission must be corrected.
Asked if any of the cases came to INEC as a surprise, Okoye replied: “I won’t single out any of the cases as the most surprising; however, I want to correct the impression in many quarters that most of the cases in court are related to the commission not doing the right thing.
“There are cases in court involving candidates not having the right qualifications. They have nothing to do with the commission. There are also cases in court involving people that were not properly and rightly nominated, which should not involve the commission. We will, this week, resume a critical analysis of those cases that do not involve the commission,” he stated.
Equally responding to the Plethora of petitions challenging the outcome of the 2023 general elections, former military Head of State, Gen Yakubu Gowon (retd) urged Nigerians to allow the Court to adjudicate on the electoral disputes before it.
“As we move forward as a nation, let us not forget the role that the judiciary plays in nation-building. As such, we need to allow the apex court to come up with their deliberations and come up with their decisions, and we must accept their decisions as final in order to maintain the sanctity of the judiciary,” Gowon appealed.