Atiku Abubakar, presidential candidate of the Peoples
Democratic Party (PDP), has accused the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC)
of trying to compromise the judiciary.
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC)
declared Bola Tinubu, candidate of the APC, as the winner of the presidential
election.
Tinubu secured 8,794,726 votes to defeat Atiku who had the
second-highest figure of 6,984,520 votes, while Peter Obi of the Labour Party
(LP) came third with 6,101,533 votes.
However, Atiku and Obi are challenging Tinubu’s victory at
the tribunal, asking the court to void the outcome of the poll.
Part of the grounds for the challenge, the petitioners said,
was Tinubu’s failure to secure at least 25 percent of votes cast in the federal
capital territory (FCT).
However, Tinubu, through Wole Olanipekun, his counsel, told
the tribunal that the FCT is the 37th state for electoral purposes and any
other interpretation would “lead to absurdity, chaos, anarchy and alteration of
the very intention of the legislature”.
‘PLOT TO INTIMIDATE
JUDICIARY’
In a statement by Paul Ibe on Saturday, Atiku’s media
adviser, the former vice president said the APC and agents of Tinubu have
“ceaselessly chosen to stand in the way of justice by making “catastrophic
threats to anarchy if justice is not served according to their whims”.
Atiku accused the APC of plotting to intimidate the
judiciary by harassing the judges involved in the petition and called on the
international community to be alerted.
“The plot of the APC is simple: intimidate the judiciary,
threaten judges with arrest so that they will bow to their will. This is a
playbook from 2019 when they removed the CJN and then replaced him with Tanko
Muhammad, who himself was later accused of corruption by his colleagues at the
supreme court and resigned shamefully,” the statement reads.
“However, the APC government never went after Tanko Muhammad
as they did in Onnoghen’s case because it was never about corruption but the
election. The APC has, over the years, built a reputation for judiciary
intimidation.
“They accused about
10 judges of corruption, stormed their homes, and got them suspended and yet
could not convict a single one of them. Justice Sylvester Ngwuta of the supreme
court could not recover from the embarrassment that he ended up dying in
office.
“Now, they have initiated a new plot. This time around, they
want to intimidate the judges into delivering favourable judgments for them at
the election tribunal. We draw the attention of the international community
and, indeed, Nigerians to this fresh plot to steal the mandate of over 200
million people.”
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