Peter Obi and his Labour Party, LP, stopped their case against President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s election at the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC) on Friday.
Obi and LP filed the case with the number CA/PEPC/03/2023, which is a challenge to the general election of 2023 that put Tinubu in charge as president of Nigeria on May 29.
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Tinubu, Vice President Kashim Shettima, and the All Progressives Congress (APC) are all named as respondents in the case.
The petitioners had three weeks to show the court why they were right and the defendants were wrong.
They told the court that they would bring in fifty witnesses to show their case, but as Friday was the last day of court, they only brought in thirteen witnesses.
Earlier, Livy Uzoukwu, SAN, Counsel for the Petitioners, told the court that Yunusa Tanko, their twelfth witness, was in court to be cross-examined by the Respondents.
Kemi Pinheiro, SAN, is the lawyer for INEC and Wole Olanipakun, SAN, is the lawyer for Tinubu and Shettima, and Lateef Fagbemi, SAN, is the lawyer for the APC.
Yunusa Tanko, a member of LP Situation Room, was the twelfth witness (PW12). He testified, and some papers were given to the court through him.
During INEC’s cross-examination, the witness told the court that the results they were given were messed up and couldn’t be read.
Olanipekun asked how many party agents his party had during the election, and he said more than 130,000. There were 176,974 polling places across the federation.
Tanko was also asked what he wanted the court to do with the twelve states where LP won and what would happen to Atiku Abubakar, who was named second.
He said he was contesting the whole election result because, four months after the election, people are still downloading the results from the IreV.
Fagbemi asked him why he didn’t give the number of illegal votes, and he said that their expert had already said how many votes were in question.
The people who responded did so through the Federal High Court’s witness rulings, such as FHC/ABJ/1454/2022, which was handed down on January 23, 2023, in the case of LP vs. INEC.
Peter Yari, PW 13, who was a temporary employee of INEC, also testified in court.
After PW13’s evidence, the petitioners’ lawyer, Uzoukwu, told the court that they are ending their case.
The people being sued asked the court to give them until next week to go home and spend Sallah with their families. They also asked to be able to start their case on July 3.
NAN says that the five-person panel led by Justice Haruna Tsammani has given the defendants until July 3 to start their case.