Go to court, CSO tells aggrieved parties

A civil society organisation, Centre for Leadership and Justice, has said the utterances by some political stakeholders on the outcome of Saturday’s presidential election are capable of “setting the country on fire.”

The organisation urged any aggrieved political party to approach the court instead of calling for the cancellation of the elections.

The convener of the Centre for Leadership and Justice, Mr Emmanuel Umohinyang, stated this against the backdrop of calls by the Peoples Democratic Party, the Labour Party, and the African Democratic Congress that the 2023 general election be cancelled over alleged irregularities that marred the exercise across the country.

He said, “I think that if the parties you have mentioned are aggrieved or do not agree with what has been declared, it is incumbent on them to approach the election petition tribunal. Fortunately, the Court of Appeal has original jurisdiction in dealing with issues of this kind.

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“I do not agree that the elections should be cancelled and my reasons are very simple. What they had put out had been that they were incidents of over-voting. They cited the example of Ekiti State, it is not enough to ask for an election to be cancelled just because you do not agree with certain parameters because a particular candidate is leading.

“The election you are complaining of, is it not this same INEC that conducted the election in Lagos where the LP’s Peter Obi won? Is it not this same INEC that conducted the election in Katsina where the PDP’s Atiku Abubakar won in the President’s home state?”

While noting that politics is all about numbers, he said the party with the highest number of votes spread across two/third states and the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja, would emerge victorious at the end of the collation.

Umohinyang also took a swipe at former President Olusegun Obasanjo, who had in an open letter to the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), slammed the Independent National Electoral Commission of an alleged compromise in the electoral process and demanded to reschedule the polls.

According to Umohinyang, the era of Obasanjo’s administration allegedly witnessed the worst elections in the nation’s history, saying he (Obasanjo) should not be the one talking about the descent election. 
       
“If there is anybody who should speak about this election and comment about the issues of rigging, it shouldn’t be Obasanjo because under his watch, in the 2003 elections, Nigeria was a war zone. Also in 2007, he introduced the phrase do-or-die politics.

“He cannot be the one writing a letter to a man like President Buhari, who had consistently said that he would leave a legacy of a free, fair, and transparent election. Writing a letter to Buhari is an insult, it is a slap to decency, and it has no place in a modern democracy.”