hose who wish to assess the validity of the Supreme Court judgement in the petitions filed by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) presidential candidate Atiku Abubakar and the Labour Party (LP) presidential candidate Peter Obi are wasting their time. The final court, like the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC) before it, gave judgement unanimously in favour of President Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC). There is nothing the assessors can say and no logic they can adduce to convince the petitioners and their supporters that justice was not both bought and miscarried, whether it relates to the issue of 25 percent of the Federal Capital City (FCT) votes, the issue of IReV, or the incredulous attempt to introduce fresh evidence. The Supreme Court justices, all seven of them, and the PEPC justices, all five of them, were unanimous in their decisions. The justiciability of the suits has ended, but the politics surrounding them has not.
Apart from the law of the cases, which is fairly uncomplicated for any sensible person and lawyer, there are two other issues Nigerians must pay attention to: the fresh momentum the decided cases must now afford President Tinubu himself and his administration, and the political futures of Alhaji Atiku, a former vice president, and Mr Obi, a former Anambra State governor. The Supreme Court verdict has now unshackled the president to launch freely and fiercely, within the constraints of the law, into his renewed hope agenda. He will no longer be distracted by the suits, nor does he need to pay more than a cursory attention to the ‘fishing expeditions’ in the United States embarked upon mainly by Alhaji Atiku who was determined to introduce wholly extraneous matters into the petitions, partly to confuse and intimidate the justices, and also to fertilise the conditions for a successful incitement of the populace. The president must of course pay attention to the opposition, and hopefully the opposition will offer sound and practicable alternatives to the administration’s policies and programmes, but he will now do so with much more confidence and even-handedness. With the conclusion of the cases, the president should hopefully be less prone to gaffes and missteps, most of them uncharacteristic of him and the legend associated with his name and politics.
Probably the first casualty from the dismissed PDP and LP petitions is the dissipation of the synergy that had given fillip to the relationship and politics of Alhaji Atiku and Mr Obi. For about eight giddy months after their shocking losses in February, both candidates had collaborated in their shared grief and malice: grief over their career-shattering losses, and malice against a winner they least expected to win and whom they roundly loathed. They had addressed so-called world press conferences and made statements festooned with sarcasms and cynicisms. But at every turn, and after their media excursions, their plots and plans had fallen flat. Nature, rather than any deliberate response by President Tinubu, had thwarted the losing candidates’ efforts and put their noses out of joint. Even Alhaji Atiku’s expeditions to the United States to dredge out inconsistencies and contradictions in President Tinubu’s educational background amounted to nothing in the end. Apart from his feeble suit, Mr Obi had also limited himself to essentially issuing tame allegations and baiting the president with tendentious statements.
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The PDP and LP candidates may have synergised their plots and incited the public against President Tinubu’s election victory, but strangely, the cooperation did not extend to their lawyers’ handling of their petitions. It is unlikely their counsels did not know the tenuity of their cases, nor the nigh impossibility of getting the election annulled. There is even doubt that the candidates themselves did not know that their petitions would both fail on points of law and in the court of public opinion to which they had recklessly and punitively resorted. The lawyers and the candidates most probably knew they were heading nowhere, if the ordinary man on the street already guessed that outcome even before the cases were decided. They, however, did their utmost, not to win in court, for that was impossible, but to confound the justices and furnish a revolution. In the end, the justices kept their wits and dispensed justice; and the revolution the opposition candidates had craved also fell through.
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