The Enugu State Governorship Election Petitions Tribunal on Friday upheld the election of Governor Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi in the April 11, 2015 governorship election.
The tribunal dismissed the petition filed by the governorship candidate of the All Progressives Congress in the state, Okey Ezea, on the grounds that it was frivolous, lacked merit and was an abuse of court process.
A cost of N150,000 was equally awarded in favour of each of the respondents in the petition.
Delivering the judgment, which lasted over three hours, the chairman of the tribunal, Justice Kwajafa Hildad, held that several paragraphs of Ezea’s petition were earlier struck out for being imprecise and vague.
According to Hildad, the petition equally contained criminal allegations against people who were not made parties to the case.
He added that the petitioner’s allegations of overvoting and non-accreditation, through the manipulation of the card reader machine by the Independent National Electoral Commission and other respondents, were not sufficiently proved as it was only the voters register that could determine the number of people that voted in an election.
He maintained that the petitioner failed to provide the voter registers to prove his case.
The tribunal also noted that the petitioner only provided six witnesses drawn from only six polling units out of the 2,958 polling units in the state, a figure which was seen as insufficient.
Continuing, the tribunal held that the six witnesses admitted that the governorship election was free, fair and peaceful “with minor irregularities, which were not sufficient enough to cancel the election”.
No comments:
Post a Comment