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Akinwande Soji-Ojo
The Court of Appeal sitting in Abuja has set aside the the judgement of the State Election Petitions Tribunal that sacked Nasarawa State Governor, Abdullahi Sule, from office.
Delivering judgement on Sule’s appeal on Thursday, the three-member panel led by Justice Uchechukwu Onyemenam, held that the tribunal was legally bound to act on witness statements filed along with the petition or front-loaded within 21 days stipulated by law.
The Appellate Court held that the tribunal, led by Justice Ezekiel Ajayi, acted in grave error in using witness statements on oath and not front-loaded as required by law to arrive at the “unjust conclusion of nullifying the election of the governor.”
The court held that no petition can lawfully be amended outside the 21 days allowed by law as wrongly done by the tribunal.
Justice Onyemenam noted that the tribunal denied the governor a fair hearing by not considering and making findings on the issues of jurisdiction raised at the hearing of the petition.
“Since the statements used by the tribunal to sack the governor were not front-loaded in compliance with the law, this court held that the statements were the product of illegality with no probate value for a law court to act upon,” the judge held.
He also dismissed the allegations of over-voting used to annul the governor’s election, adding that the allegations were not established by law.
Justice Onyemenam held that the petition by the governorship candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), David Ombugadu, was null and invalid on the grounds that the jurisdictional issues raised by the governor were unlawfully ignored by the tribunal.
The judge agreed that the denial of a fair hearing against the governor was fatal and rendered all decisions of the tribunal invalid.
He subsequently reversed all orders made against the Sule and the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).
The court subsequently affirmed Sule as the lawfully elected governor of Nasarawa State.
INEC had declared APC’s Sule the winner of the governorship election after he polled 347,209 votes, to defeat his closest challenger, Ombugadu of the PDP, who got 283,016 votes.
But in a split decision of two to one, the tribunal had on October 2 nullified Sule’s election and declared Ombugadu as the authentic winner of the March 18, 2023 election.