Peter Obi’s petition against Tinubu incompetent, defective beyond repair – Tribunal

Peter Gregory Obi, the presidential candidate for the Labour Party, had his petition dismissed by the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal on Wednesday in Abuja due to serious incompetence and irreparable defects.

In its judgement on multiple challenges to the petition, the Tribunal wiped out several paragraphs for being insufficient, unclear, and contradictory.

Obi’s petition was deemed to have included various broad charges of malpractices, irregularities, and corruption without providing the specifics necessary by law, according to Justice Abba Mohammed’s judgement.

According to the Tribunal’s ruling, even though Obi claimed to have received the largest number of legitimate votes in the presidential election held on February 25, he gave no indication of how many of those votes he received.

Justice Mohammed said the situation was made worse because the presidential candidate for the Labour Party had pleaded the report of forensic experts but had not included it in the petition or served it on the respondents.

As an additional point, Justice Mohammed ruled that Obi’s claim that his votes were suppressed in favour of Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress, APC, was unconvincing because he did not provide any specific numbers to back up his claim.

Since Obi never specified how many votes were incorrectly given to Tinubu, the Tribunal also found his claims to be without merit.

Justice Mohammed addressed the claims of corrupt practises, saying that not all allegations of corruption are considered corrupt practises and that averments in a pleading must be precise rather than broad. Obi had made the latter mistake.

“The Law is very clear that where someone alleged irregularities in a particular polling unit, as in the instant petition,” it held. “Such a person must prove the particular irregularities in that poling unit for him to succeed in his petition.”

The Tribunal further found that Obi did not provide evidence of the specific polling units where elections did not take place or detail the polling units where the complainants of irregularities claimed to have witnessed voting problems.

Details to come…