Tinubu is the President-elect of Nigeria having been declared so by the election management body, the INEC. The circumstances of his declaration have been allegedly controversial hence the decision of his major opponents to challenge the declaration at the presidential election petitions tribunal which has a maximum of 180days from March 21st 2023 to deliver judgement on the matter. To the best of my knowledge, four political parties are challenging him, his political party and INEC at the tribunal and so many serious issues have been raised in the petitions which are worth noting.

Some of these have been elucidated upon in my previous interventions. Suffice it to say that the concerned political parties have been rigorous in formulating their petitions. The decision on the elegance of their petitions is for the courts to make since the matters are now in the courts. However, it is important to crystallize some of the issues raised in the petitions which would influence the decision of Lord Justices. Therefore, at the risk of repeating myself, I restate them as follows;

1) authenticity of the employment history of the APC presidential candidate,

2) authenticity of the gender because the Bola Tinubu that was admitted into the Chicago state University was a FEMALE.

3) discrepancy in citizenship (Dual citizenship) because the Bola Tinubu that was admitted into the Chicago state university was also an AMERICAN (US) CITIZEN but the APC presidential candidate stated in his INEC nomination form that he has no dual citizenship,

4) authenticity of the university attended in the US and the certificates obtained ( THE CERTIFICATES NORMALLY ISSUED TO GRADUATES OF THE CHICAGO STATE UNIVERSITY IS DIFFERENT FROM THE ONE SUBMITTED TO INEC BY THE APC PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE)

5) authenticity of colleges attended in the US and Nigeria because the Bola Tinubu that was admitted into the Chicago state university claimed to have attended THE GOVERNMENT COLLEGE LAGOS and the colleges which the APC presidential candidate claimed to have attended in the US is different from the ones attended by the Bola Tinubu that was admitted into the Chicago state university.

6) the difference between the votes scored by first and second candidates in the presidential election is allegedly lower than the total number of votes in the polling units where elections were canceled or did not hold using the voter register made the election INCONCLUSIVE,

7) The votes cast are more than the number of voters accredited by BVAS rendering such elections liable to cancellation,

8) non-electronic transmission of polling units results and individual polling units result sheets direct to IreV portal real-time as mandated by the electoral act and other subsidiary legislations of INEC IS A VITIATING ELEMENT,

9) failure of INEC to review the results based on the complaints by the political parties as provided by the electoral act which allowed it 7days to do so,

10) announcing a president-elect when less than 50% of the results had been uploaded even when the law allowed the INEC chairman 14days to put his house in order and to use the electronically uploaded results to confirm the authenticity of the manually collated results,

11) failure of INEC to seek the consent of the political parties before resorting to manual collation and tabulation of results assuming the electronic transmission failed because the 2022 electoral act predicated on the electronic transmission of Polling units results using BVAS,

12) failure to explain to Nigerians and political parties what went wrong with the electronic transmission of the results from polling units assuming there were glitches in the ICT SYSTEM and other infrastructure as alleged,

13) differences between the electronically uploaded polling units results and the results announced by INEC,

14) double candidacy of the APC vice presidential candidate,( HE CANNOT ACCEPT NOMINATION AS A SENATORIAL AND VICE-PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE AT THE SAME TIME IN THE SAME ELECTION)

15) the status of the forfeiture of the sum of $460,000 to the government of the US by the APC presidential candidate,( WAS IT A CRIMINAL OR CIVIL CASE?)

16) failure of the APC presidential candidate to mention this adverse fact in the sworn INEC nomination form and perjury,

17) the genuineness of the other information and documents tendered by the APC presidential candidate and ASSOCIATED PERJURY AND FORGERY,

18) failure of the APC presidential candidate to state the primary and secondary schools attended and years even if the certificates were unavailable,(nobody is admitted into a post-secondary institution without evidence of secondary school attendance even a TESTIMONIAL),

19) declaration of a president-elect based on mutilated and opaque results from the polling units knowing fully well that mutilations, cancellation and erasures on polling units results sheets rendered them contestable, questionable, suspicious AND INVALID thus making the determination of which candidate scored the highest number of votes problematic and impossible,

20) the issue of 25% requirement for the FCT. If the constitution intended the FCT to be the 37th state of Nigeria, it would have stated so by using the word ; including the the FCT taken as a state immediately after two-third of the states in the federation in section 134. The AND FCT would not have been there. In fact, only 25% in two-third of the states in the federation would have sufficed. The USE OF THE CONJUNCTION ‘AND’ BEFORE THE FCT MEANT THAT THE 25% REQUIREMENT FOR FCT WAS COMPULSORY BECAUSE THE 25% REQUIREMENT FOR THE FCT CAN STAND AS A SEPARATE SENTENCE,

21) voter suppression, harassment, intimidation, maiming and killings by political thugs and some egregious conducts by INEC,

22) exclusion of the name of the presidential candidate of one of the political parties from the election.

I believe that the election petition periods of 240 days and 300 days in the cases of presidential and gubernatorial elections respectively allowed by the constitution to litigate on the elections are excessively long and give undue advantage to the DEFENDANT president or governor when wrongly declared winner in the first place. For fairness and credibility ,all elections petitions should be decided before the SWEARING IN. Having done election petition since 1999, our Judges and Justices must have devised ways of drastically shortening the litigation period so that all petitions are disposed of before the SWEARING IN. I believe that a period of 90days is appropriate for the petitions even if it would require shifting the inauguration and swearing in date to OCTOBER 1 as it used to be. But elections must hold in FEBRUARY AND MARCH OF THE ELECTION YEAR.

· Godson O. Moneke