This was stated on Friday in a ruling delivered by a three-man panel of the court led by Justice Joseph Ikyegh.
The Presidential Election Petition Court in Abuja has ordered that the ‘President-elect’, Bola Tinubu, should be served with copies of petitions seeking to nullify his election through alternative means.
This was stated on Friday in a ruling delivered by a three-man panel of the court led by Justice Joseph Ikyegh.
The panel directed that the petitions should be served on Tinubu through his political party, the All Progressives Congress.
Separate ex-parte applications were filed before the court by the Peoples Democratic Party's (PDP) candidate, Atiku Abubakar, and his Labour Party counterpart, Peter Obi.
However, the petitioners accused Tinubu of avoiding being served their petitions on purpose, Vanguard reports.
They told the court that several attempts to serve the petitions on Tinubu were unsuccessful.
According to the petitioners, the ‘President-elect’ deliberately avoided them in order to frustrate their efforts to hand him copies of the petitions as required by law.
As a result, the petitioners sought the court's intervention, citing Sections 6(6a) and 36(1) of the 1999 Constitution, as amended, Section 15 of the Court of Appeal Act, and Paragraph 8 of the First Schedule of the Electoral Act 2022.
Both Atiku and Obi provided affidavits of urgency and non-service in support of their ex-parte motions dated March 23, even as they persuaded the court to hear the applications outside the pre-hearing session of their substantive petitions.
While Atiku's legal team, led by Mr. Eyitayo Jegede, SAN, filed his application on Friday, Mr. Ikechukwu Ezechukwu, SAN, filed that of Obi and Labour Party.
“Having heard the applications by counsel to the petitioners including the affidavit in support, the applications are hereby granted,” the Justice Ikyegh-led panel ruled.
The panel equally granted leave to the Allied Peoples Movement, APM, to also serve its own petition on Tinubu, via substituted means.
The Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, on March 1, declared Tinubu of the ruling APC the winner of the presidential poll, ahead of 17 other candidates who contested the election.
According to INEC, Tinubu polled a total of 8,794,726 votes to defeat Atiku who polled a total of 6,984,520 votes and Obi of the LP who came third with a total of 6,101,533 votes.
However, both Atiku and Obi rejected the outcome of the election which they insisted was rigged in Tinubu’s favour.