The Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC) in Abuja expressed dissatisfaction with the legal team of the Labour Party and its presidential candidate, Peter Obi, for causing delays in the proceedings of their case challenging the victory of President Bola Tinubu in the 2025 presidential polls.
The panel of five judges criticized the opposition candidate’s legal team for not properly organizing the schedule of documents for seamless tendering as exhibits. This rebuke came after Mr. Obi’s legal team requested an adjournment due to the ill health of one of its members.
Mr. Obi and his party had filed a petition challenging the outcome of the February 25 presidential election. During the resumed hearing of the petition, the court expressed disappointment with the team’s failure to present the schedule of documents as required during the pre-hearing stage.
Consequently, the court temporarily suspended the hearing to allow the lawyers, led by Awa Kalu, a professor and Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), to rectify the situation. Upon resuming from the break, the panel insisted that the documents presented by Emeka Okpoko, another SAN and member of the petitioners’ legal team, still did not meet the pre-hearing stage’s specifications.
As a result, the judges requested that Mr. Obi’s team adjourn to organize the documents before returning to tender them properly. One of the panel members, Misitura Bolaji-Yusuf, expressed dissatisfaction, stating that the actions of the petitioners’ team were wasting the court’s time.
Mr. Kalu, however, requested that the court allow his team to tender the documents they had instead of taking an adjournment, as they had already lost a day. The court granted the petitioners’ request to proceed but announced that they would challenge the election results in 18 out of the 36 states.
Subsequently, the petitioners proceeded to tender certified true copies of electoral documents obtained from the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in six of the 18 states whose results they are challenging. The court admitted these documents as exhibits after they were marked appropriately by the court’s chairperson, Haruna Tsammani.
It is worth noting that INEC, who issued the documents to the petitioners, objected to their admissibility as evidence. Representatives of President Bola Tinubu and Vice-President Kashim Shettima, whose election is being challenged, also expressed their intention to object to the admissibility of the documents in their final addresses.
The case has been adjourned for further hearing until Friday. The documents tendered and admitted as exhibits include Forms EC8A, which are election results from polling units, from various local government areas in states such as Rivers, Benue, Cross River, Niger, Osun, and Ekiti.
Mr. Obi and his party are challenging the election of President Bola Tinubu and Vice-President Kashim Shettima based on allegations of electoral malpractices during the February 25 presidential election.