The hearing of the petition filed by Mr. Peter Gregory Obi and the Labour Party (LP) against the election of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has been stalled once again, marking the third time the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC) stepped down hearing.
The court discovered that the documents being tendered to establish allegations of malpractices during the February 25 presidential election were not properly scheduled in accordance with the Court’s order.
During proceedings, a lot of discrepancies were uncovered when rendering the documents from the 23 local government areas of Benue. All efforts to reconcile the anomaly and reschedule the documents proved unsuccessful as the errors were beyond immediate solution.
To avert further delay, Chief Emeka Okpoko SAN, counsel to Obi and the Labour Party, sought to use documents not filed to conduct the proceedings, but the move was rejected on the grounds of illegality.
In the end, the court stepped down the hearing of the petition and ordered the legal team to re-file the schedule of documents in line with the provisions of the pre-hearing report.
At the time of this report, Peter Obi and the Vice Presidential candidate, Datti Baba Ahmed, were present in court as their lawyers scrambled to file a new schedule of documents with the Registry of the Court.
Despite the setback, the five Justices led by Justice Haruna Simon Tsammani hearing the petition remain confident and committed to ensuring that justice is served at the end of the proceedings.
