By Atilade Atoyebi

The 2019 Presidential Election in Nigeria took place on February 23. It was a straight contest between the incumbent, Muhammadu Buhari seeking a second term in office and Atiku Abubakar , a former two-term Vice President. When the final result of the election was announced, Buhari on the ticket of the All Progressives Congress, APC polled 15,191,847 while Atiku running on the platform of the People’s Democratic Party, PDP got 11,262,978. The margin of Buhari’s victory is 3,928,869.

Do you know that 73 candidates actually contested the election? However, the remaining 71 candidates behind the frontrunners can best be described as ‘also ran’. This is more so in that Felix Nicholas of People’s Coalition Party, PCP who came third in the election got just 110,196 votes.

Dissatisfied with the result of the election Atiku headed for the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal, PEPT to challenge the victory of President Buhari. On Wednesday this week, the Tribunal delivered judgment on the case after several weeks of legal fireworks among lawyers representing Atiku and PDP on one side, those appearing for the Independent National Electoral Commission, somehow in the middle and Buhari and APC on the other side.

The judgment delivered by the five-man panel of judges led by Justice Mohammed Garba last about eight hours.

To start with, Atiku and PDP approached the election tribunal to seek the following reliefs:

• That President Muhammadu Buhari submitted false information to the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC on his academic qualification through the mandatory form that he completed and gave to the Commission prior to the election. This act by the President should disqualify him from contesting the election.

• That INEC transmitted results of the election electronically and had a server where the results were collated.

• That going by the result obtained from INEC server, he, Atiku won the election by over 2 million votes.

• That the election was marred by malpractices like vote buying, ballot box snatching and disruptions that should not make the result of the election to stand.

• That Buhari used security agents to influence the electoral process to his advantage.

The tribunal took the trouble to examine several interlocutory motions that came up during the trial and pronounced its opinion on them one after the other with legal citations to back its decisions. Let’s highlight some of those motions as follows:

• The National Independent Electoral Commission, INEC had filed a motion stating that Atiku’s lead counsel who signed the list of witnesses to be called by the petitioner (Atiku), Dr. Livy Uzoukwu, Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) was not known to the Nigerian Bar because of duplicity of names traced to his person. The tribunal laid this matter to rest by saying that Levy Uzoukwu, appearing for Atiku was duly called to the Bar in Nigeria.

• The issue of whether or not Atiku Abubakar was qualified to stand in the presidential election was raised by the Buhari legal team. Atiku was said to have hailed from Cameroun, a country next door to Nigeria. Again, the tribunal ruled that from all available pleadings before it, Atiku is indeed a Nigerian. Besides, Buhari should have raised the matter as a cross petition.

• There was also controversy over whether or not the Vice President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo should have been joined in the suit which suggested that failure to do so should render the entire suit a nullity. The tribunal side-stepped that matter when it ruled that it was immaterial whether or not the Vice President was joined in the substantive suit as both himself and Buhari ran on one ticket anyway.

• The competence of the tribunal in treating the authenticity of the documents submitted by President Buhari to INEC was put to test. Buhari’s men had canvassed the argument that it was a pre-election matter that should not have been brought before the election petition tribunal. The five judges were unanimous in their opinion that the matter could be examined by the tribunal.

When the tribunal took up the substantive matters placed before it by Atiku Abubakar, the following definitive pronouncements were made by the lead judge and at the end of the day accepted by the four other judges on the panel.

• The tribunal reviewed the affidavit submitted by Buhari to INEC and said that the claims he made in them were substantiated by the evidence provided by his classmates and school mates. The tribunal also referred to his attendance at the Military Cadet School in Kaduna in 1962 and his service record and came to the conclusion that Buhari was eminently qualified to contest the 2019 presidential election. In any case, the judges said that the 1999 Nigerian Constitution does not state that a candidate in should pass West African School Certificate Examination. He only needs to have attended school up to School Certificate level.

• On the issue of whether or not INEC transmitted the results of the election electronically and into an INEC server, the tribunal held that the petitioner had not adduced sufficient evidence to prove his assertion especially when the INEC Act 2010 as amended did not make provision for the use of electronic means to collate the results of the election. The tribunal dismissed the evidence of the petitioner’s key witnesses (No. 59) as unreliable as his source of information was from a third party and not from INEC server. It was also decided that if there is no provision in the INEC Act in respect of collation of results by electronic means and into a server, the petitioner should not have brought that matter before the tribunal.

• Then the question of whether or not the election was conducted with substantial level of compliance. Atiku and his team were told that they did not provide sufficient evidence to dent the credibility of the election and therefore the result must stand. The tribunal said that it could not rely on the petitioner’s evidence about people that were alleged to have disrupted the election process because nobody was brought to trial and convicted for such offence. It is not the duty of the tribunal to vicariously hold such persons guilty of electoral offences for which they were not given opportunity to defend themselves.

• The allegation that Buhari used security agents to skew the election in his favour was dismissed by the tribunal on the grounds that the allegation could not be substantiated by the evidence before it. The tribunal wondered why the petitioner (Atiku) did not join the security agencies in his petition. Again, the tribunal felt that it should not assume that those agencies were guilty of the allegations made against them by the petitioner.

From the look of things, Atiku lost on all the grounds of his petition and the tribunal said so when it dismissed it “in its entirety”.

Atiku has described the verdict of the tribunal as a travesty of justice. He is expected to head for the Supreme Court, the final adjudicator in the election dispute.