The ruling of the Governorship, National, and State Assembly Election Petitions Tribunal, which dismissed the petitions of the All Progressives Congress’s candidates for the Senate, House of Representatives, and House of Assembly, as well as its candidate for governor, Patrick Tonye-Cole, was disagreed with by the party in Rivers State.
In a statement made available to the media in Port Harcourt, the APC stated that it viewed the justification for the dismissal of the petition filed by the party’s governorship candidate as “hypothetical and inconsistent with the position of the Supreme Court, which had on November 14, 2003, in the case of Buhari & 2 Others Vs. Obasanjo & 2 Others (Suit No. SC/194/2003 (Buhari Vs. Obasanjo), held that a
The statement emphasised that “This is even made clearer by the construction of Section 133 subsection 1 of the amended Electoral Act (2022), where the Act unambiguously mentions those qualified to institute/file an election petition,” which stated that “Candidates may jointly file election petitions in their individual capacities and that the law does not make them one and the same for the purpose of the petition.”
The three-man panel led by Cletus Emifonye, the party claimed in a statement released on Thursday and signed by the state publicity secretary Darlington Nwauju, allowed itself to be “ambushed by purely political innuendos rather than speaking to the law, which is abundantly clear as enumerated in the paragraph above.”
Nwauju asserted that the Tribunal’s decision, which was given on October 2, 2023, made a mockery of the legal system and violated an earlier Supreme Court decision.
In spite of evidence provided by the party that Governor Siminialayi Fubara, the then candidate of the PDP, was still the state’s Accountant General at the time he became a candidate for his political party, the statement claimed that the judgement of the Tribunal confirmed the Rivers APC’s concerns about the likelihood of receiving justice.
The APC criticised a “series of copy and paste rulings aimed at weakening the base of the party in Rivers State” and urged the judiciary not to endanger the nation’s democratic process by issuing decisions that lack legal support.
The statement made it clear that the state chapter or its candidate(s) were never consulted on the matter, and that the National Working Committee of the party, which was led by Abdullahi Adams, never met to discuss the withdrawal of the state party’s petitions from the Election Petitions Tribunal.
