Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, the presidential candidate for the governing All Progressives Congress APC, has convened his legal team to take on his opponents, Mr. Peter Obi of the Labour Party and Alhaji Atiku Abubakar of the People's Democratic Party PDP, both of whom had pledged to challenge his win in court.
At the same time, Tinubu announced he would file a cross-petition against Mr. Obi, who received more than 6.1 million votes in the race, alleges that the LP candidate developed the political rigging apparatus that gave him such a number.
Festus Keyamo SAN, the minister of state for labour and employment and spokesman of the Tinubu-Shettima Presidential Campaign Council PCC, made this announcement at a press conference on Friday in Abuja.
“We have constituted our legal team and I am part of it. We have volunteers who are SANs. We are going to file a cross-petition to cancel the votes of LP in virtually all the South East states. We are going to court too. If you look at results from the South East, there was one incident where the results from a whole ward were filled using one handwriting. What it means is that they accredited people and asked them to go home and then thumb printed for them. He imported his rigging machine into Lagos State. Go and look at the results from Festac”, he stated.
Keyamo called for sanctions against the Attorneys General of the states that decided to challenge Tinubu's victory at the Supreme Court, claiming that they should have started the process in a lower court.
He explained that: “I think without commenting on the merits of the cases, as someone who has sworn to protect the image of the bar, I think we should begin to take some serious look at the conduct of some lawyers. Any lawyer who goes to the Supreme Court instead of going first to the tribunal, I think we should begin to take a critical look at such lawyers. The Supreme Court is not the court of first instance”.
