The Supreme Court has reserved judgement in the appeal filed by the Presidential candidate of the Labour Party, LP, Peter Obi challenging the judgement of Presidential Election Petition Court which upheld the election of President Bola Tinubu.
A seven-man panel of the apex court led by Justice Inyang Okoro, okayed the matter for judgement, after all the parties adopted their briefs of argument.
While Obi and the LP, through their team of lawyers led by Dr. Livy Uzoukwu, SAN, urged the court to uphold the appeal and set aside the judgement of the Presidential Election Petition Court, PEPC, that dismissed their petition.
The Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, President Bola Tinubu and the All Progressives Congress, APC, through their respective counsel , prayed the court to dismiss the appeal for want of merit.
The panel said it would communicate the judgement date to all the parties.
Obi had in his 51 grounds of appeal, maintained that the PEPC panel erred in law and thereby reached a wrong conclusion when it dismissed his petition.
He alleged that the panel wrongly evaluated the proof of evidence he adduced before it and occasioned a grave miscarriage of justice when it held that he did not specify polling units where irregularities occured during the election.
Obi and the LP further faulted the PEPC for dismissing their case on the premise that they did not specify the figures of votes or scores that were allegedly suppressed or inflated in favour of President Tinubu and the APC.
They accused the Justice Haruna Tsammani-led PEPC panel of erring in law when it relied on paragraph 4(1) (d) (2) and 54 of the First Schedule to the Electoral Act 2022 to strike out paragraphs of the petition.
While accusing the lower court of breaching his right to fair hearing, Obi insisted that evidence of his witnesses were wrongly dismissed as incompetent.
He told the apex court that the panel unjustly dismissed his allegation that INEC uploaded 18, 088 blurred results on its IReV portal.
