The majority of the opposition candidates in Nigeria announced on Thursday that they would appeal President Bola Tinubu’s victory to the Supreme Court after a tribunal on Wednesday rejected their initial petition.
The People’s Democratic Party’s Atiku Abubakar and the Labour Party’s Peter Obi, who finished second and third, respectively, had requested the court to annul the election. They did this by claiming everything from vote fraud to the electoral agency’s failure to electronically upload results. They demanded Tinubu’s exclusion.
“Our clients are dissatisfied with the judgement just delivered and we have the firm instruction of our client to challenge the judgement on appeal. The court has promised us that possibly by tomorrow, we are going to get a copy of the judgement, also to have us to swing into action,” said Livy Uzoukwu, lead counsel to Peter Obi of the Labour Party.
Judges dismissed all allegations, including fraud, made by Labour Party candidate Obi in a decision that was read aloud over a period of time. In Nigeria, which experienced the return to democracy in 1999 following three decades of essentially nonstop military rule, no judicial challenge to the results of a presidential election has ever been successful.
“There are certain things, certain principles of law that we know that we need to explore, and we strongly believe that when we get to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court will have the opportunity to review a number of things that have been said here today. So, we have the instructions of our client as soon as possible to go to the Supreme Court,” said Chris Uche, lead lawyer to the PDP’s Atiku Abubakar.
Tinubu received the fewest votes of any president since the return to democracy in a country of more than 200 million people, 87 million of whom were registered to vote.
