About four months after whirlwind
proceedings, the presidential election petition tribunal has scheduled August
21 for final arguments in the petition filed by Atiku Abubakar, PDP
presidential candidate, against President Muhammadu Buhari, challenging the
outcome of the election.
On Thursday, the president’s
legal team closed its case, which it opened on Tuesday, at the tribunal after
calling only seven witnesses.
Wole Olanipekun, lead defence
counsel, said closing the case was to “restrict the legal duel to the four corners
of this honourable court’’. The proceedings in the past few days have
re-awakened slumbering controversies.
Since May 8, when the tribunal
commenced sitting, there has been a twirling of claims and counter-claims by
the parties to the case.
THE BULKACHUWA EXIT
 |
| Bulkachuwa presided over the proceedings before having to step aside because her husband is in APC |
On May 16, the legal team of the former vice president filed a motion asking Zainab Bulkachuwa, president of the appeal court and chairman of the tribunal, to recuse herself from presiding over the case. It alleged that the judge was the wife and mother of two prominent members of the APC and that she could show bias in handling the matter. A firestorm of reactions followed afterwards.
Bulkachuwa had presided over the
first few proceedings of the tribunal, and she had pledged that “justice will
be done to all parties without fear or favour, affection or ill-will.”
On May 22, she announced her
withdrawal from the panel. This was despite a judgment dismissing the motion
seeking her recusal.
‘’I am recusing myself from the
panel for personal reasons’’, she said. She also said the judgment was a
precedent for future cases of similar bent.
Besides Bulkachuwa, there are
judges whose spouses are politically-exposed persons, and with peculiar cases
such as this, the intricacy of the law will always be tested.
ATIKU ‘NOT CITIZEN’ BY BIRTH
 |
| Atiku’s Cameroon roots became a major topic of discussion |
In its response to the PDP
petition, the APC claimed Abubakar is not a citizen of Nigeria by birth, and
that he ‘’ought not to have even been allowed in the first place, to contest
the election’’.
The Nigerian constitution
prescribes citizenship by birth as a requisite for the office of president.
In its counter appeal, the party said: “The parties are not
entitled to any prayers being sought by them’’, and it urged the tribunal to
“dismiss the petition with substantial cost as same is devoid of any merit and
also founded on frivolity, having not been initiated bonafide but on palpable
abuse of judicial process’’.
Nnamdi Kanu, leader of the
proscribed Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), had actuated the controversy
over the origins of the PDP presidential candidate. He claimed Abubakar is a
citizen of Cameroon and not of Nigeria, having had his place of nativity in a
part of Adamawa that was a portion of northern Cameroon until the plebiscite of
1961 which wedded that area of Cameroon with Nigeria. Abubakar was born in Jeda
in November 1946 before the unification.
The APC couched its case on this
claim and argued that “votes purportedly cast’’ for Abubakar were wasted.
Abba Kyari, chief of staff to the
president, who appeared before the tribunal on Wednesday, re-emphasised this
claim.
This is a grey area in Nigerian
law that the courts will have to interpret to enrich the jurisprudence.
SERVER OR NO SERVER
 |
| Voters were accredited electronically but whether or not the results were transmitted to a server became the bone of contention |
One of the claims of the Abubakar
legal team is that an alleged INEC server contained figures, which put the PDP
candidate in the leading gear over the APC candidate.
The PDP and its presidential
candidate, through their counsel, Levy Uzoukwu asked the tribunal to order INEC
to grant them access to its server and smart card reader records.
The petitioners claimed that from
the data in lNEC’s “server’’, the results from state-to-state computation
showed that Abubakar had a total of 18,356,732 votes to defeat Buhari who had
16,741,430 votes.
However, Yunus Usman, INEC
counsel, in a counter affidavit urged the court to reject the application.
“They are asking us to bring
something we do not have,” he said.
‘’My Lord, the commission did not
deploy such technology infrastructure in the last general election.’’
INEC has been emphatic in its position
that there is no server for the 2019 election. Though it admitted it mulled
relaying results from the field electronically, the commission said it
jettisoned the idea owing to budgetary constraints.
The electoral umpire also said it
only experimented with transmitting results electronically in Anambra, Sokoto
and Osun elections.
The tribunal will decide if the
petitioners proved their case in this regard, though there were some
inconsistencies in the testimonies of the witnesses they called.
‘TYPO-ED’ CERTIFICATE
 |
| Buhari presented secondary school certificates but the question of their validity was played up by the PDP |
A highlight of the proceedings at
the tribunal is the furore over Buhari’s “missing’’ certificate.
The PDP argued that Buhari was not
eligible to vie in the 2019 presidential election for not submitting his
credentials to INEC as required by law. It also claimed the president did not
have the minimum qualification to run for the election.
On Wednesday, Oshideinde
Adewunmi, a former official of the West African Examinations Council (WAEC),
said the president obtained a Cambridge University West African Examination
certificate.
Adewunmi, a witness called by
Olanipekun, said this while being
cross-examined by Uzokwu.
The former WAEC official,
however, added that Cambridge certificate presented to the tribunal has a
typographical error.
He explained that the Cambridge
certificate has “Mohamed Buhari” rather than “Muhammadu Buhari” as the name of
the second respondent.
He also said though the Cambridge
certificate has six subjects, the president sat for eight in 1961.
These discrepancies are stoking
renewed controversy over Buhari’s ”certificate”. And this issue may not be
going away soon.
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