Court orders substituted service as Tinubu ‘elusive’
By Jeph Ajobaju, Chief Copy Editor
Bola Tinubu should be served with copies of petitions seeking to nullify his election through substituted means, the Presidential Election Petitions Tribunal (PEPT) sitting in the Court of Appeal in Abuja ruled on Friday.
The ruling came after separate ex-parte applications were filed by Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) presidential candidate Atiku Abubakar and Labour Party (LP) presidential candidate Peter Obi.
Both Atiku and Obi accused Tinubu of deliberately avoiding the service of their petitions on him as he thwarted several attempts made to do so.
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Tinubu frustrating service efforts
The petitioners said the President-elect, a member of the All Progressives Congress (APC), deliberately made himself elusive in order to frustrate their effort to hand him copies of the petition as required by law, per reporting by Tribune.
They sought the intervention of the court, based on Section 6(6a) and 36(1) of the 1999 Constitution, as amended; Section 15 of the Court of Appeal Act; as well as Paragraph 8 of the First Schedule of the Electoral Act 2022.
Both Atiku and Obi supported their ex-parte motions dated March 23 with affidavits of urgency and non-service, and persuaded the court to hear the applications outside the pre-hearing session of their substantive petitions.
Atiku’s application was moved on Friday by his legal team led by Eyitayo Jegede, SAN, that of Obi and by Ikechukwu Ezechukwu, SAN.
Naja’atu’s allegation of Buhari rigging election for Tinubu irks APC
Naja’atu Mohammed, former member of APC Presidential Campaign Committee (PCC), has accused President Muhammadu Buhari of rigging the election for Tinubu.
APC Director of Publicity Bala Ibrahim has laughed it off, saying she lacks credibility and should not be taken seriously.
Naja’atu, now a loyalist of Atiku, also accused Buhari of violating the rule of law, corruption, and other similar vices she said have been the hallmark of governance in the past eight years.
A statement she personally signed in Abuja las week knocked Buhari for the open display of his ballot paper after voting on February 25, describing it as an affront to electoral law which stipulates secret balloting.
“The just concluded presidential election has further exposed the inability of … Buhari to rule this country fairly and justly; a President that has never shied away from spitting on the laws of the land that have been entrusted to him to serve, and to protect,” she said.
“He is the President that has led the most inept and corrupt regime in the history of Nigeria; a President that promised us free and fair elections after putting Nigerians through the most hardship recorded in the history of this country, only for him to fail to deliver on his electoral promises; a President that will openly and brazenly raise his ballot paper before the public to show the world who he has voted for.
“With such an embarrassing action, not only did the President commit an illegal act by going against the secret ballot system enshrined in our electoral law, but also against the electoral law that calls for the end of political campaigns 48 hours before the election.
“These unlawful acts by the President are a clear directive by the President to the Independent National Electoral Commission and to the security agencies on which party to favour and to rig for.
“This administration will unfortunately be remembered as an administration that maintained contempt for the rule of law and never shied away from disobeying court orders.
“With such disregard for the new Electoral Act, it is clear that INEC as an institution, starting with the Chairman of the Commission, has been compromised and therefore, the Chairman of the Commission should resign with immediate effect, as Nigerians cannot trust him to oversee the governorship election.”
APC dismisses allegations
“Naja’atu is a member of the Police Service Commission. You will recall that she was dropped from the list of supervisors to monitor election activities in the North East after the APC PCC petitioned the PSC because of her partisanship,” Ibrahim countered.
“She was not just openly partisan, she was also a card-carrying member of the PDP.
“She got the position of member of the PSC by virtue of her membership of APC from the North West. If Naja’atu has shame and credibility, she ought to have resigned completely from the PSC immediately she dropped her membership of the APC.
“But because it is lucrative, she was only interested in relinquishing her membership of the party and not membership of the position she secured through the party.
“That does not show a person with credibility. You cannot divorce your wife and still be sneaking in to meet her. If you leave, you have to leave completely. That is the meaning of resignation in principle.
“Anybody with this kind of dented credibility cannot pontificate about the credibility of any agency or personality. This is because if you want equity, you mustn’t come with dirty hands. Her hands are soiled. She is not in a position to talk about anything.”