PETER OBI AT THE TRIBUNAL: A WATERY PETITION, A HOLLOW WRITTEN ADDRESS

By Michael Chibuzo

It is becoming a torture these days when I go through court filings of the counsels to the Labour Party Presidential Candidate, Mr. Peter Obi at the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal sitting in Abuja. One major success of the Obi Tribunal circus is the lowering of the bar of election petitioning in Nigeria. I have taken time to dissect the very watery petition of Mr. Peter Obi as well as how the petitioner struggled to make his case during the hearing. In this piece, I want to simply delve into the final written address of the Petitioner in response to written address of the 2nd and 3rd respondents.

In the Peter Obi written address, his counsels enumerated 13 ‘relevant facts’ and two issues for determination. Their relevant facts i) to iv) are simply regurgitating their earlier averments in their petition which laboured to establish double nomination of Vice President Kashim Shettima and disqualification of President Bola Tinubu on the ground of a 1993 civil forfeiture of $460,000 ordered by a US District Court of Illinois. Their ‘relevant facts’ v) to xii) dwelled on IREV portal and electronic transmission of results while their ‘relevant facts xiii) is on 25% in the FCT joke.

So, in the Obi written address the two issues for determination they basically dwelled on were; 1) disqualification of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu on account of the 1993 civil forfeiture in the US and alleged double nomination of Vice President Kashim Shettima; and 2) Inability of INEC to electronically transmit polling unit results from the polling units to the IREV portal on the day of the Presidential election as being substantial non-compliance to the provisions of the Electoral Act and therefore enough reason to cancel the election. From the two issues listed about it is obvious that Peter Obi’s legal team are still trying everything possible to convince the court that there is an ocean in the Sahara desert even when they cannot point the exact location of the said ocean.

In their argument in support of the disqualification of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu on the ground of civil forfeiture of $460,000 in 1993 ordered by the US District Court in Illinois, Peter Obi’s legal team wasted 18 paragraphs of their written address trying to prove among other things that the 1993 $460,000 forfeiture, though a civil forfeiture amounts to a fine which according to them is one of the grounds for disqualification as provided in Section 137(1)(d) of the Constitution since the fine was imposed on the 2nd Respondent for an offence involving dishonesty or fraud. The petitioners went on a definition spree, defining the meaning of fine, money laundering, dishonesty, fraud in addition to arguing in favour of the admissibility of the certified true copy of the said 1993 judgment containing the civil forfeiture order even though the said judgment was not registered in Nigeria as required by the Foreign Judgment (Reciprocal Enforcement) Act.

In all their meandering and manoeuvres, they desperately avoided Section 137(1)(e) of the Constitution, which simply rendered all their arguments of civil forfeiture useless. They are simply obsessed with only paragraph (d) and wants to mislead the public to believe that is all there is to the issue of disqualifications. Let me once again reproduce paragraphs (d) and (e) of that sub-section 1 here:

(d) he is under a sentence of death imposed by any competent court of law or tribunal in Nigeria or a sentence of imprisonment or fine for any offence involving dishonesty or fraud (by whatever name called) or for any other offence, imposed on him by any court or tribunal or substituted by a competent authority for any other sentence imposed on him by such a court or tribunal; or

(e) within a period of less than ten years before the date of the election to the office of President he has been convicted and sentenced for an offence involving dishonesty or he has been found guilty of the contravention of the Code of Conduct; or

Let’s look at the fine details in paragraph (d). It emphasises “under sentence of death…” or “sentence of imprisonment…”. What these two separate phrases means is that for an individual to be ineligible to vie for the office of the President, he or she must be UNDER SENTENCE, which means the sentence of death or imprisonment is still in force. Crucially, a court does not sentence anybody in a CIVIL case. It can only sentence an individual in a CRIMINAL case. The word, ‘sentence’ is the punishment a judge or magistrate decides should be given to someone who has been CONVICTED of a CRIME. It comes at the END of a PROSECUTION. In this case, Obi’s legal team in their written address agreed that the fine of $460,000 was a civil forfeiture and therefore not as a result of any criminal trial.

It therefore smirks of hollow posturing for Obi’s legal team to be pushing for the disqualification of the 2nd Respondent on account of the $460,000 civil forfeiture simply because it is a fine and they saw the word, ‘fine’ in section 137 of the Constitution. It is therefore not surprising that they went out of their way to define fine for us, in an attempt to import a new meaning into section 137(1)(d) of the Constitution. It is obvious that President Bola Tinubu was not subjected to a criminal prosecution in 1993 by the District Court of Illinois and there was certainly no sentence as there can only be sentence if there was a prosecution.

Now paragraph (e) of that section 137(1), which Obi’s lawyers have been avoiding like covid-19 will help us better understand the preceding paragraph (d). The paragraph states that even if the individual aspiring to be president has been convicted (found guilty) and sentenced (punished) for an offence involving dishonesty, or he has been found guilty of the contravention of the code of conduct, such a person can contest for the Presidential election after 10 years (that of course means he has finished serving his sentence within the 10 years). If the person is still under sentence of imprisonment and it is now more than 10 years since the sentence was handed to him, paragraph (d) will still be in force and he or she will be ineligible to contest. Paragraph (e) takes effect when the sentence has been served following the conviction and within 10 years.

Now let’s even assume without CONCEDING to the fact that President Bola Tinubu was convicted in a criminal trial in Illinois and sentenced in 1993, it follows that as at 2003, he has become eligible to contest for any office in accordance with Section 137(1)(e) of the Constitution since he is currently obviously not in jail nor under any active sentence. This is so simple and straightforward but Peter Obi’s Lawyers, would rather dance around in the market square in a clear abuse of court processes just to please Peter Obi and his mob and keep them hooked to a shisha of hope that Obi is coming.

In the Written Address, Obi’s counsels as expected continued their Shettima double nomination refrain and dedicated 9 paragraphs to argue disjointedly. I have dealt extensively on this double nomination issue in my dissection of Peter Obi’s petition few months ago and I do not intend to dwell on this more than necessary. The feeble attempt to convince the court that Vice President Kashim Shettima contravened Section 35 of the Electoral Act 2022, which dwelled on what amounts to double nomination is very laughable.

Like I pointed out then, Sen. Kashim Shettima did not participate in any Vice Presidential primary in addition to the Senatorial primary for Borno Central. It would have been double nomination if after being appointed by President Bola Tinubu to be his running mate, Sen. Kashim Shettima still held onto the Borno Central Senatorial ticket as at the time INEC published its final list of candidates or up till the day of the election. But none of these happened.

On the issue of alleged non-compliance with the Electoral Act 2022 and subsidiary legislations, Peter Obi’s counsels spent 70 paragraphs that covered 18 out of their 42-page Written address talking about electronic transmission of results to IREV! In fact in those 70 paragraphs, they mentioned IREV 58 times! Obi’s Lawyers described the IREV as the ‘kernel of Peter Obi’s entire petition’ (page 13, paragraph 28 of their written address). They were angry at the simplistic manner, President Tinubu’s counsel Wole Olanipekun SAN, treated their IREV obsession in his Written Address.

Peter Obi felt that the delay in the upload of the scanned form EC8A to the IREV portal amounted to substantial non-compliance to the provisions of not even the Electoral Act 2022 directly but the INEC Guidelines and Regulations for the Conduct of the 2023 General Elections, which it described as a subsidiary legislation that derived its power and legitimacy from the Electoral Act and whose provisions must be obeyed to the letter. They did not make any attempt to argue that results from specific polling units collated by INEC were different from what was announced at the polling units and entered in the various form EC8As. This ordinarily should be the basis of a serious election petition alleging substantial non-compliance to the provisions of the Electoral Act.

If Mr. Peter Obi and his legal team wants to establish that he got majority of the votes or that there were over voting in many places, the building block of his petition should be the true copies of the polling unit results he is disputing, the accompanying accreditation data in the BVAS device of the affected polling units and the voters registers therefrom. The INEC Result Viewing (IREV) portal does little to help him prove his case. Unfortunately, Peter Obi channelled his energy trying to prove that INEC officials did not upload polling unit results to IREV portal immediately after the form EC8As have been filled, signed and distributed to party agents; and that the failure to upload these results on the spot to IREV invalidates the entire results and election. What a hollow argument!

On the 25% in the FCT question, Mr. Peter Obi’s legal once again went into the Realm of the absurd when in spite of their rigmarole around Section 299 of the Constitution accepted that the Constitution and Supreme Court pronouncements provided that the FCT be treated as if it were a state but insisted that when interpreting section 134(2)(b) of the same Constitution, the FCT be treated like a King whose votes will determine the winner of a Presidential Election. Their argument on this point is bereft of any reasonable logic other than attempting to force a literal interpretation of ’36 states AND the FCT’ to mean ‘in addition to the FCT’. They failed to establish why a vote in the FCT will be worth more than votes in the other 36 states of the federation.

They bizarrely argued that governorship and state assembly elections usually hold in the 36 states but due to the special status of the FCT it is not included. Peter Obi went further to argue that since the person elected as President is the administrator of the FCT through a Minister he appoints, it is rational for the president to secure at least 25% of the votes cast in the FCT. The question Peter Obi and his legal team will struggle to answer if we are to follow their line of argument is this: if a president must secure 25% of the votes cast in the FCT because he will administer the FCT, is it not paramount that every elected national assembly member from the 358 federal constituencies and 108 senatorial districts outside the FCT must in addition to being voted for in their various constituencies also secure 25% of votes in the FCT since section 299(a) of the Constitution vested all legislative powers for the FCT on the House of Representatives and the Senate just like it vested the executive powers on the President?

I need to also point out that Obi’s feeble argument that a President must secure 25% in the FCT to acquire the ‘mandate’ to administer the FCT in line with Section 299 of the constitution does not even make any basic sense because if the reason is to derive sovereign power from the residents of the FCT, then the threshold should not be 25% but a majority of the votes cast in the FCT. Scoring 25% of the votes in the FCT does not mean a candidate won the FCT and if we are to go by the line of argument of Obi, it still does not grant any legitimate mandate to the president over the FCT. This is a most hallucinatory and watery argument by the Obi legal team.

In conclusion, I want to give an advice to the hordes of Mr. Peter Obi and Labour Party supporters who are eagerly anticipating the ‘restoration of a mandate to Peter Obi’ by the PEPT to wake up from their slumber and face reality. Obi is not coming. It is very evident in the final Written Address of his legal team that they do not have any reasonable argument to make in support of the their petition. In fact, in their conclusion they pointed the Tribunal judges to a portion of the Kenyan Supreme Court 2017 judgment annulling the election of Uhuru Kenyatta and urging them to replicate that feat by annulling Nigeria’s 2023 Presidential Election.

You then begin to wonder where the stolen mandate noise is coming from. If you are praying for a restoration of a mandate you will focus on proving that you got the highest number of votes and met the Constitutional spread and most importantly you will tabulate what you feel is the correct vote figure. However in this instant case of Mr. Peter Obi, from their main petition to this written address, there was no mention of what they believe is Peter Obi’s true total number of votes that made him the true winner. It is therefore clear that Peter Obi is simply entertaining his base and trying to paint a picture of a robbed candidate ahead of a possible run in 2027.