The petition was deemed to be abusive, vague, non-specific, ambiguous, and academic by the commission, who pleaded with the court to either reject it or dismiss it.
The Labour Party (LP) and its presidential candidate, Peter Obi, have filed a petition, and the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has requested that the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal dismiss it.
The election of Bola Tinubu, a member of the All Progressives Congress (APC), as president-elect, was contested by Obi and the LP in a petition.
Additionally, they asserted that Kashim Shettima, Tinubu’s running mate and the incoming vice president, had received two nominations in violation of the Election Act of 2022.
The petitioners claimed that the election had been tainted by fraud and manipulations, and that the INEC had broken its own rules when it announced the results because, at the time of the announcement, all polling unit results had not yet been fully scanned, uploaded, and transmitted electronically as required by the electoral act.
The commission claimed that the reliefs requested by Obi and his party are not admissible in a response submitted by INEC.
The petition was deemed to be abusive, vague, non-specific, ambiguous, and academic by the commission, who urged the court to reject it or strike it out.
The grounds of the petition, according to INEC, are ambiguous.
The petitioners’ argument that Tinubu did not receive a majority of the valid votes cast further damaged the petitioners’ credibility, according to the panel.
The electoral board claimed that the petitioners’ request to declare that Obi received the majority of valid votes cast in the election and be declared the winner was invalid because they had not joined the required parties and lacked the information required to substantiate their claim.
The commission ruled that Obi cannot be re-elected because he did not receive a majority of the valid votes cast in the election or a quarter of the votes cast in each of at least two-thirds of the states that make up the federation and the FCT.
Regarding the claim of non-representation, INEC asserted that the petitioners did not have polling agents in every polling unit in Nigeria because they only provided a list of 134, 874 polling agents, which is 41, 972 agents short of the 176, 846 polling units in Nigeria.
