Presidential Election: ‘INEC favours Bola Tinubu’, Peter Obi gives strong evidence in court

Peter Obi and the Labour Party have pointed accusing fingers at the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), alleging that the electoral umpire favoured Bola Tinubu, the president-elect.

Obi and his party were considered the third force in the 2023 election and are challenging the declaration of Tinubu, the candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), as the winner of the election.

Obi and his party, in a petition with a marked number CA/PEPC/03/2023, the lead counsel to Obi and the Labour Party, Livy Ozoukwu, argued that Tinubu was not elected with a majority of the lawful votes cast during the February 25 presidential election.

In other allegations, they claimed that Kashim Shettima, the vice president to Tinubu, had a double nomination, which was against the Electoral Act.

But the electoral commission, through its lawyer, Abubakar Mahmoud, argued that the prayer of Peter Obi and his party could not be granted.

INEC then urged the court to either strike out the petition or dismiss it over gross incompetent, vague, generic, non-specific, equivocal, academic, abusive, nebulous, general, ambiguous, and hypothetical.

But Obi and the Labour Party, in a response filed on April 21, faulted the position of the commission for filing a preliminary objection.

The petition reads in part: “The 1st respondent, forgetting its role as an electoral umpire, gave a notice of preliminary objection to challenge the alleged incompetence of the petition.”