[VIDEO] LIVE JUDGEMENT: Watch the 2023Presidential Election Tribunal
The long-awaited judgement in the petitions filed by the PDP and Atiku Abubakar and that of the Labour Party and Peter Obi, challenging the victory of President Bola Tinubu and the APC at the 2023 Presidential elections is ongoing at the Court of Appeal in Abuja.
The petitioners, Atiku Abubakar, Peter Obi, and the APM, are seeking the nullification of Tinubu’s victory.
Watch the LIVE proceeding on OPERA NEWS APP below
Two of the petitions were filed by the leading opposition presidential candidates – Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), who came second behind Mr Tinubu, and Peter Obi of the Labour Party, who took the third position, according to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). A total of 18 candidates contested the election.
The third petition was filed by a political party, the Allied Peoples Movement (APM), whose presidential candidate, Chichi Ojei, scored 25,961 votes out of the over 28 million votes cast during the election. There were two other petitions filed by the Action Peoples Party (APP) and the Action Alliance (AA) at the court before the close of the window for filing presidential election petitions in March but were withdrawn before hearing began.
The two separate but typical petitions filed by Atiku and Mr Obi, centre on election and pre-election issues. They attacked the qualification of Mr Tinubu to contest the election, the legality of the nomination of his running mate, the integrity of the election process, and the threshold of the spread of votes used by INEC to declare Mr Tinubu as the winner of the poll.
Both Atiku and Mr Obi individually asked the court to either declare them the winner of the election or order a fresh poll. Should the court choose to order a fresh election, they prayed that Mr Tinubu and his party, the APC, should be barred from participating in it.
