Presidential Election Tribunal: Buhari, APC and the elusive will

By Ifeanyi Izeze

For few days now, the media has been awash with APC’s faulting of the candidacy of Atiku Abubakar, the PDP presidential candidate in the just concluded presidential election. The party is arguing that Atiku is a Cameroonian and ought not to have taken part in the presidential poll of Nigeria in the first instance.

Ordinarily this would have been treated as a joke but for the obvious fact that the APC is deliberately diverting attention from the serious issues presented at the tribunal all in a ploy to buy time.

Without doubt, the APC and its candidate, Mohammadu Buhari seem not to  have any defence against the petition of the PDP/Atiku challenging the massive rigging and manipulations of figures by INEC in its declared results of the February 29^th presidential election.

It should have occurred to the APC and its presidential candidate that their pedestal response to the gross allegations of massive rigging and manipulation of figures was an outright vindication of the facts and figures presented by Atiku in his petition.

Agreed that defending a lie is a very hard task because you keep manufacturing lies to explain earlier ones, but questioning Atiku’s citizenship at this time instead of addressing the petitioner’s allegations of rigging suggests an obvious desperation on the part of the ruling party. So they had to divert the attention of the people with this fable. The unusual time the APC lawyers wasted to counter Atiku’s petition would have told any discerning mind that they were rattled by the solidity of the verifiable facts in the petition.

They have tried all sorts of mischief to intimidate and harass Atiku all to no avail. First it was the allegation by the APC against Atiku and PDP of hacking into the INEC server to access figures released by the electoral umpire. On that one they simply roared and melted out.

Second, they came with the threat to arrest Atiku over his alleged moves to lobby the United States Government not to recognise a new government in Nigeria if Buhari goes on to inaugurate himself without clearing the allegations of massive rigging, changing of actual election results and using the military to intimidate voters across the country particularly in the Southern parts of the country during and after the elections. That also could not hold waters.

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Now, they have come with another one that Atiku is not a Nigerian but a Cameroonian because Adamawa state was part of that neighbouring country even before my great grandfather was born. Haba!

If Atiku is insisting that his case is based on facts and statistical evidence, is it not behoving on both the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and the APC, to disprove his factual submissions?

Given the time they wasted to counter Atiku’s petition before the tribunal, one would have expected the APC lawyers to have come with solid evidence that there was no rigging rather than this ludicrous diversionary arguments challenging Atiku’s qualification to contest the presidential election because he is not allegedly a citizen of Nigeria.

The panic and diversionary or rather pedestal mode APC has turned on is an obvious confirmation that Atiku and his party, the PDP, definitely have verifiable and incontrovertible evidence to show that the last Presidential election was fraudulent, not credible and did not reflect the will of the Nigerian people.

Recall that it was in its response to the petition filed by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and its presidential candidate at the Presidential Election Tribunal, that the APC averred that contrary to the assertion of Atiku in his petition, he (Atiku) had no right to be voted for as a candidate in the election to the office of President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria held on February 23, 2019. The party said the 11.1 million votes recorded in favour of the two petitioners ( Atiku and PDP) should be voided and considered a waste by the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal.

Interestingly, when Atiku was in APC funding Buhari’s campaign in 2014-2015 and even handed his media office to run the Buhari campaign then, he was not a Cameroonian. When he emerged PDP Presidential candidate, he was not a Cameroonian. When he campaigned all over Nigeria and was pulling more crowd than Buhari, he was not a Cameroonian. Now that he has challenged Buhari’s blood stained and rigged victory at the polls, Atiku has suddenly become a Cameroonian. How long can we afford to continue like this as a country?

In every respect it is better to strongly doubt if the APC lead counsel; a “learned silk” can goof in such manner by displaying his ignorance of the Law or will make himself a cheap article to settle political scores.

The desperate attempt to rewrite our history by political personalities just to suit their personal interests and narratives, and hold on to power by all means placing logic on its head in order to confuse the past and convince the present about their shenanigans at the last presidential election cannot work with the people.

At best, this is a cheap propaganda and mischief of the highest order; misrepresentation of facts; figments of lies; and wild imaginations of the protagonists in this charade.

The fact that the APC chose to base its defence on the ridiculous assertion that Atiku is not a Nigerian, should show to the nation the type of characters we have in the APC and its government. The party’s response was not just too pedestal in a serious matter like this but diversionary to steer the nation from the issues being contested by the opposition party at the election tribunal.

As explained by a legal luminary and a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) in his comment on the alleged submission by the APC legal team, “Our groundnorm which is the 1999 Constitution of the federal Republic of Nigeria clearly in chapter 111. Section 25, Subsection 1a 1b &1c defines in an unambiguous manner what it entails to be Citizens by birth.

“If People from Adamawa are alien or some of them do not have the constitutional rights to contest Election into the office of President which is the exclusive right of only Nigerians with citizenship by birth, Atiku could not have cleared this constitutional hurdles in his last three attempts of been cleared to contest for the office of the President Federal Republic of Nigeria.”

How come the INEC is having problem defending the results of an election it conducted and announced? Even APC cannot defend the results of an election they claimed they won, is it not interesting?

As said, rather than deflect of the world from the meat of Atiku’s petition at the Triunal, Buhari and APC should redirect their focus on the points already raised by the PDP presidential candidate, that is the only path that can clear their names from the mess the 2019 presidential elections was believed to be by a majority of reasonable Nigerians as a result of the desperation of those who seek to be in power by all means and against the people’s will.

God bless Nigeria!

IFEANYI IZEZE: [email protected]