- The grounds primarily focused on alleged ineligibility for Aliyu and Gobir to contest, certificate falsification, name variation, election fraud, and non-compliance with electoral guidelines
The Court of Appeal in Abuja is set to resume the hearing on Tuesday regarding the appeal filed by the Sokoto state Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) governorship candidate, Sai’du Umar, against Governor Ahmed Aliyu of the All Progressives Congress (APC).
Earlier, the three-man Election Petitions Tribunal, led by Justice Haruna Msheila, unanimously dismissed the PDP’s petitions on September 30 of this year, stating that the petitioners failed to substantiate the six formulated grounds in the petition.
The grounds primarily focused on alleged ineligibility for Aliyu and Gobir to contest, certificate falsification, name variation, election fraud, and non-compliance with electoral guidelines.
The tribunal mentioned that the petitioners couldn’t sufficiently prove the allegations beyond a reasonable doubt as mandated by law. Additionally, 70% of the exhibits were deemed out of context as they related to state assembly elections conducted on the same dates.
According to him, to prove the forgery of two different documents of persons needed to be presented while the variation of names issues was a settled supreme court provision.
He said three subpoena witnesses were not tenable as they were not makers of the documents from the alleged primary school, while the other 28 polling units’ agenda testified could not be produced identify themselves along with their roles.
The Tribunal Chairman said the alleged 138 polling units frauds were not adduced to indicate substantial non-compliance of the elections have marred the election outcome.
Confirming the notice of appeal, the special adviser on media and publicity to the PDP governorship candidate in the March 18 governorship election, Nafiu Lema, while speaking with our Journalists on the telephone.
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