Mike Ozekhome, Senior Advocate of Nigeria, SAN, and human rights activist, has said that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), shouldn’t have declared Bola Ahmed Tinubu, presidential candidate of the All Progressive Congress (APC), as the winner of the just concluded February 25, 2023, presidential election.
Ozekhome, who disclosed that the election was poorly done, poorly handled, obviously manipulated and obviously compromised, noted that Tinubu did not score 25% in the FCT as required by the law to be declared winner.
He said that even if he scored in 24 states without scoring in the FCT he could not and should not be declared president elect as INEC wrongly did.
Speaking on what the tribunal should do, following the controversies surrounding the election, stated that all these are matters that must and will be challenged at the tribunal.
He expressed his lack of faith in present INEC and urged the tribunal in handling the case, to focus on the justice of the matter and not on technicalities.
According to him, the electoral act of 2022 makes it clear in several sessions that the results of the election must be uploaded from the polling units, and there are about 127,974 polling units in Nigeria.
“The constitutional requirement is that you must upload results from these polling units. But what we saw was INEC resorting to manual, mutilating result, shutting down their portal for over 24 hours during which time all the doctoring and surgical operations had taken place.
“The election was therefore not fair, it was not transparent, it was not genuine, it was not credible. And so the emergent president-elect is going to carry a very strong, heavy burden of legitimacy and the lack of it.
“It doesn’t require even demonstrations and protests on the streets to drive home these points. The issue is a moral burden on him. And not only that, it is clear from the provisions of the constitution, if you check session 132 to 134, that the winner of the presidential election must not only win plurality of the votes; that is the most number of votes, he must also win 25% in each of at least 2/3 of the Nigerian states and the federal capital territory. What does that mean; you must get 25% in 24 states and the federal capital territory.
“For the judiciary, my advice to it is that in deciding this case it must look critically at the justice of the matter not at technicalities. It must look at the wishes of the Nigerian people as expressed through the poll, not technicality. I do not want a judiciary, I have already said many times that Nigeria does not operate democracy, which was a word coined and defined by Abraham Lincoln, a former American president on the 19 of November 1863, that we do not operate a democracy, we operate many cracies which are not demo.”
It will be recalled that before the results of the election was announced by INEC on the 1st of March, six states attorneys and the Attorney General of the Federation had filed a case against INEC, urging the court to stop the electoral body from announcing the result.
The case, which was filled by Ozekhome, SAN, at the Supreme Court was between Adamawa, Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa, Delta, Edo, Taraba and Sokoto states and the AG of the Federation.
However, in a new development, the states and the federation have discontinued with the case.
According to Ozekhome, the suit has been discontinued due to the fact that the flawed results have already been announced and the President-elect declared, albeit illegally and unconstitutionally.’
“Having been overtaken by events, it will now be a tribunal matter,” he said.
