The Cross River Governorship Elections Petition Tribunal sitting in Calabar has upheld that the election of Prof Ben Ayade of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in March this year, was duly conducted and that he won.
Delivering the judgement on Thursday 12 September 2019 at the court sitting in Moore Road Calabar on the petition number cap EPT/CAL/Gov/1/2019, Chairman of the Tribunal Justice Josiah Majebi, said the first and second grounds of the petition were irreconcilable and mutually exclusive.
According to the judge, in the first place the petitioner had failed to seek redress within legally specified 14 days allowed by law for complaints.
The tribunal also strongly disagreed with the petitioner that he was wrongfully excluded by the second respondent, INEC, stressing that much of the grievances expressed in the petitioner were pre-election matters which his tribunal has no jurisdiction to entertain. Such matters include nomination, withdrawal, exclusion from contesting election.
He said, “Any dispute (s) within a given political party which stands election before actual election such as nomination or withdrawal or exclusion are preelection issues. Our mandates don’t cover them. Therefore, such are ineffective grounds. We therefore strike them and such others out for incompetence.”
The tribunal also held that there were multiplicity of litigations by interested parties of the APC regarding the governorship election which complicated the petition
The judge said they have carefully considered the applications, written addresses and counter responses by the respondents, and have overruled many views of the petitioner as lacking in merit and gross abuse of court processes.
He maintained that the petition is academic, hypothetical, and frivolous adding that, “the petitioner’s allegation that he was excluded from the election yet he scored valid votes of 131,161 makes his petition contradictory.
“Having painstakingly and profoundly looked over the submissions and considered several legal authorities, we hereby reject entire evidences given by the petitioner, and dismiss the petition as lacking in merit. We resolved the matter in favour of the first respondent. Consequently, we here declared that Prof Benedict Ayade was duly elected on 9 March 2019 as the governor of Cross River State”.
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