Tinubu’s legal battle over 2023 presidential poll reaches Supreme Court

Despite a current lawsuit against the way the 2023 presidential election was conducted, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has been hauled before the Supreme Court for allegedly presenting himself for inauguration as President in violation of the law.

Chief Albert Ambrose Owuru is requesting that Tinubu’s inauguration as the winner of the 2023 presidential election be declared void, citing the theory of Lis Pendens, a candidate for president in the 2019 general election.

Given his pending lawsuit against Tinubu and others at the Supreme Court, constitutional lawyer Owuru argues that the presidential election that produced Tinubu was an exercise in futility and unconstitutional self-help.

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Chief A.A. Owuru and the Hope Democratic Party are the appellants in the ongoing Supreme Court case with case number SC/667/2023, while the respondents are Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, INEC, AGF, and former President Muhammadu Buhari.

Due to lis pendens, Owuru contends that Tinubu’s INEC declaration of him as president is an affront to the Supreme Court and established law. He further states that since Tinubu is a party to the ongoing lawsuit before the Apex Court, he should not have run for office in any presidential election.

Owuru ran against former President Muhammadu Buhari in the 2019 presidential election on the platform of the Hope Democratic Party (HDP), and he asserted that he had been declared the winner by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).

On May 18 of this year, Tinubu voluntarily entered his claim as an interested party, seeking an order of court to declare him the declared and constitutional winner of the 2019 election. The petition is currently ongoing before the Supreme Court.

The former presidential candidate is also pleading with the Supreme Court to issue an order prohibiting the respondents, and specifically Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, from using the Federation Account until the constitutional questions raised by the 2023 election are determined and resolved, in a new motion on notice served on Tinubu through the Chambers of Chief Wole Olanipekun SAN.

In a statement he made in Abuja about the lawsuit alongside the civil organisation Hope Africa Foundation, Owuru argued that Tinubu was subject to dismissal because he had violated the doctrine of liz pendis and had voluntarily joined as an interested party following heated arguments from his lawyers.

The National Coordinator of the Africa Hope Foundation, Anwal Ibrahim, signed the declaration, which stated, in part, that Tinubu’s claim to the presidency is impacted by his status as Lis Pendens.

This is the case because, having joined the ongoing lawsuit regarding Buhari’s usurpation of the mandate, nothing further should have been done until the contentious issues were finally resolved.

“There is no doubt that the current claim to the presidency made by any of the parties involved in this action is a self-help act that violates the law and the doctrine of Lis Pendens, which states that nothing that parties do in this case should alter the facts before the court in order to protect Chief Owuru’s mandate as the officially declared constitutional winner of the 2019 presidential election and his already-acquired constitutional rights.

It is documented that on May 18, 2023, prior to his alleged inauguration over the disastrous 2023 presidential election, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu joined the ongoing proceedings in the Court of Appeal in recognition of the Lis Pendens doctrine and the ongoing lawsuits regarding the issue of usurpation of mandate between Owuru and Buhari.

He must wait for the resolution of the ongoing legal dispute over Owuru’s seizure of the constitutional mandate and right to carry it out.

“The legal implication of this is that the outcome of the 2023 presidential election, which Tinubu knew about prior to filing the suit, is subsumed and dependent on the resolution of the ongoing legal proceedings regarding the already decided and unfulfilled constitutional mandate of Owuru to fulfil the mandate of the President of Nigeria as stipulated by law.

In the case of Peter Obi v. Ngige (Supra), the Supreme Court affirmed the validity of our laws pertaining to the doctrine of Lis pendens, holding that parties must uphold and closely adhere to the fact that there are pending lawsuits, as well as their efficacy and potency in undermining the court’s jurisdiction, engaging in self-help, and brazenly usurping the candidate, parties’ mandate, and subject matter in the pending case.

Without a doubt, the current central government, led by the All Progressives Congress (APC), is acting usurpatorily in practise with these actions.

“As law-abiding individuals, we implore Nigerians to be patient as these unresolved matters are resolved promptly in order to determine the true identity of the country’s president.

Owuru, who declared that he was the constitutional winner of the 2019 presidential election, foresaw that he would object to Tinubu or anybody else taking Buhari’s place in office because he was the constitutional winner and had not completed his four-year term as required by law.

Among other reasons, Owuru had stated at the time that Buhari was usurping his term of office as of 2019 because the Supreme Court had not yet ruled on his 2019 suit, in which he had contested the election results that Buhari was allegedly declared the victor of.

On January 30, 2023, Justice Inyang Edem Ekwo of the Federal High Court in Abuja dismissed his initial lawsuit, which led him to move to the Court of Appeal.

In a ruling on May 25, the Court of Appeal in Abuja, presided over by Justice Jamil Tukur, one of a three-member bench, declined to halt Tinubu’s inauguration on May 29.

According to Justice Tukur, Owuru filed a pointless, tedious, and vexatious lawsuit in an attempt to agitate the respondents, constituting a flagrant abuse of the legal system.