The Supreme Court has dismissed the appeal filed by the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku Abubakar, to challenge President Bola Tinubu’s election.
The judgemet, delivered Thursday, laid to rest Atiku’s ferocious legal battle which stretched to the United States to overturn Mr Tinubu’s victory at the 25 February election.
The seven-member panel of the court unanimously dismissed the appeal after resolving all seven issues raised by the appellant in favour of Mr Tinubu.
The presiding justice of the panel, Inyang Okoro, who read the lead judgement, struck down the allegation by Atiku that failure to promptly upload the polling unit results of the election to IReV amounted to non-compliance with the provisions of the Electoral Act, thus, invalidating the election.
The court dismissed this argument, saying IReV was not a result collation platform, therefore failure to upload results onto it could not have invalidated the election.
The court also held that Mr Tinubu’s failure to score 25 per cent of the votes in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) when he had polled 25 per cent votes in 13 states did not affect his victory in the election.
The court also held that Atiku failed to prove his allegation of widespread rigging during the election or that he won the election
“I am unable to find any figures put forward by the appellant that he scored the majority votes, other than the figures declared by INEC declaring the second respondent (Tinubu) winner of the election.
“The votes before us show that the second respondent Tinubu won the election,” Justice Okoro said.
On the issue of use of disparaging words by the lower court against the appellant, Mr Okoro said “the words of the court were not meant to disparage the appellant” and did not amount to bias against appellant as argued by their lawyers.
