Presidential Tribunal Judgment: DSS, Police Begin Security Checks At Appeal Court

The Court of Appeal Abuja is currently barricaded by a combined team of Department of State Services (DSS) and the Nigeria Police Force.

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The Presidential Election Petitions Court (PEPC) sitting is domiciled on the Appeal Court premises.

Its five-man panel led by Justice Haruna Tsammani will be determining the merits of all petitions challenging the election of President Bola Tinubu.

On March 1, INEC’s Chairman, Professor Mahmood Yakubu, announced Tinubu won the February 25 poll with 8,794,726 votes while Atiku Abubakar of the PDP and Peter Obi of the Labour Party scored 6,984,520 votes and 6,101,533 votes, respectively.

The Allied Peoples Movement is also challenging Tinubu’s victory in the election.

The All People’s Party(APP) and the Action Alliance (AA) had withdrawn their petitions.

Several operatives of the DSS are positioned at the entrance of the appellate court.

They are cross checking people’s accreditation tags before allowing them to gain entrance.

This stemmed from a directive from the office of the Chief Registrar of the court which stated that those who were not given accreditation tags by the court need not come to the venue.

Also, the court said the judgment will be transmitted live by several media houses so that people can watch from their homes or offices.

Issues raised by Obi’s legal team borders on alleged suppression of his votes, alleged non-compliance to electoral laws by the Independent National Electoral Commission and Tinubu’s alleged non-qualification in view of his choice of Vice President Kashim Shettima and academic records.

For Atiku, he alleges that he, not Tinubu, won the election by a majority of lawful votes cast across the federation.

The APM seeks Tinubu’s disqualification on the grounds of his nomination of Kashim Shettima who it alleged was a senatorial candidate when he accepted to be Tinubu’s running mate.

Another contentious issue raised by Obi and Atiku relates to the status of the Federal Capital Territory in which Tinubu failed to garner 25 percent of votes in the country’s capital.

On their part, the legal teams of Tinubu and Shettima, INEC and the All Progressives Congress unanimously asked the court to dismiss all the petitions for lacking in merit.

Tinubu’s lead counsel, Wole Olanipekun SAN, had argued that the petitioners failed to prove that the 2023 election was rigged.

INEC insisted that Obi should have provided copies of LP agents’ polling units results to counter what was declared by the electoral umpire’s chairman, Yakubu Mahmood.