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JUST IN: Court Approves Obi, Atiku’s Bid To Scrutinize Election Materials

Published

2 years ago

Mar 3, 2023.

Obi and Atiku have been granted permission by a Court to examine the 2023 election materials.
Both PDP and LP had since rejected the outcome of the election.
After considering the ex-parte applications brought before it by the two aggrieved presidential candidates and their political parties, Justice Joseph Ikyegh issued the orders.

EKO HOT BLOG reports that the Peoples Democratic Party and the Labour Party presidential candidates, Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi respectively have been granted permission by a Court of Appeal sitting in Abuja to have access to all the sensitive materials the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, deployed for the conduct of the presidential election that held on February 25.

A panel of the appellate court led by Justice Joseph Ikyegh made the orders after it heard two separate ex-parte applications the two aggrieved presidential candidates filed alongside their political parties.

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Cited as Respondents in the matter were INEC, the acclaimed winner of the presidential election, Bola Tinubu, as well as his party, the All Progressives Congress, APC.

Both applications were predicated on Section146 (1) of the Electoral Act 2022, Paragraph 47 (1, 2 &3) of the First Schedule of the Electoral Act of 2022, as well as under the inherent jurisdiction of the Court as referenced by Section 6 (6) A & B of the 1999 Constitution, as amended.

While Obi, in his application that was moved by his team of lawyers led by Mr Alex Ejesieme, SAN, sought six principal reliefs, on the other hand, Atiku’s lawyer, Mr Adedamola Faloku, sought seven prayers from the tribunal.

Specifically, the applicants urged the court to compel INEC to allow them to obtain documents in its custody that were used for the presidential election.

They maintained that the requested documents would aid their petition against the outcome of the presidential contest that was declared in favour of the candidate of the APC, Tinubu.

It will be recalled that INEC had declared Tinubu of the APC as the winner of the presidential poll, ahead of 17 other candidates that contested the election.

According to INEC, Tinubu scored a total of 8,794,726 votes to defeat Atiku who polled a total of 6,984,520 votes and Obi of the LP who came third with a total of 6,101,533 votes.