The All Progressives Congress and its presidential candidate, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, launched a legal battle on Tuesday to prevent opposition parties from halting the ongoing collation of presidential election results from Saturday.
The candidate and his party filed a lawsuit to stop the Labour Party and the People’s Democratic Party from continuously announcing and collating poll results.
The suit was filed before the Federal High Court in Kano and was marked FHC/KN/CS/43/2023.
The Action Alliance and the Independent National Electoral Commission were added as defendants, with Kashim Shettima, the APC’s vice presidential candidate, also named as a plaintiff.
According to Daily Trust, the plaintiffs in a motion on notice filed alongside the originating summons asked the court to make the order restraining the defendants from stopping the collation and announcement of the results.
They argued that “damages will not adequately compensate for the injury that may be occasioned on the Plaintiffs if the Defendants stop the collation of the result.”
The PDP, LP, and the African Democratic Congress have asked the INEC Chairman, Mahmood Yakubu, to step aside and demanded the conduct of fresh elections.
“We are therefore constrained by this development to state that INEC compromised the integrity of this election even before collation commenced at the polling units.
“A failure to comply with the provisions of the Electoral Act and the guidelines makes it imperative that all results recently uploaded on the IReV portal must be updated before they are announced.
“INEC went back on that promise…This election is not free and far from being fair and transparent. We shall not be part of the electoral process currently going on at the National Collation Centre and we demand that this sham of an election be immediately canceled.
“We also call for a fresh election to be carried out in accordance with the laid down INEC procedure. We, therefore, call on Yakubu to step aside from his role,” the LP National Chairman, Julius Abure, who delivered the position of the three opposition parties, said.
