Imo And Supreme Court Verdict: Two Arguments

Imo Guber Judgment: More Questions Than Answers By Steve
Osuji

How did the Supreme Court validate Hope Uzodinma’s results which
INEC, Election Tribunal, and Appeal Court found invalid?

Those results from the so-called 381 wards have been examined at
the two levels of appeal and were found to be FORGED, CONCOCTED,
PHOTOCOPIED and LARGELY ILLEGIBLE. Not even the appellant, Hope
Uzodinma could read the results in court when challenged to do
so.

How come the Supreme Court which refused to admit ATIKU’s
electronically collated results now admits and rules based on
evidently forged and spurious result?

Apart from the fact that Hope Uzodinma came last in the election
with the least votes, an earlier Supreme Court judgement had
declared Uche Nwosu the authentic candidate of APC, it stands to
reason by that ruling that Hope’s candidacy had become a nullity.
How can a non-candidate be declared winner in an election? UNDER
WHICH PARTY DID HOPE CONTEST
THE ELECTION?

Finally, looking at other extraneous considerations like zoning
in Imo State, and eligibility of candidates, Imo people would never
have voted Hope Uzodinma to be their governor in the last
election.

All of these would suggest that the Supreme Court ruling would
amount to a blatant miscarriage of justice and indeed a
travesty.

Between the Atiku and Ihedioha judgements, our Supreme Court has
continued to prove that justice is no longer blind but rather,
justice in Nigeria has become the handmaid of the powers that
be.

History will be harsh on this Supreme Court.

Imo Gubernatorial Judgment, A Painful But Legally
Correct Verdict By Kenneth Ikonne

It is indeed a perplexing paradox: Hope Uzodinma may not have
won the 2019 Imo State gubernatorial election, yet the Supreme
Court, on the facts, was right in declaring him the winner of that
election in law. The error was not the Supreme Court’s, but that of
Governor Emeka Ihedioha’s legal team; and it was a crucially fatal
error.

What happened was this: during the governorship election in Imo
State, apparently concocted results, perhaps not having any basis
whatsoever in reality, BUT SIGNED BY INEC PRESIDING OFFICERS, were
turned in from more than 350 polling units, giving Hope Uzodinma of
the APC an incredibly unassailable lead. When those results were
transmitted to the wards collation centres, the collation officers,
who had no power in law to cancel or reject them, rejected the said
polling units results, and refused to collate them, thereby
effectively excluding them from the total tally of the governorship
result that was eventually declared by the Returning Officer. In
the aftermath of the said exclusion, the Independent National
Electoral Commission declared Governor Ihedioha the winner of the
election.

The exclusion of the results of those polling units was the
fulcrum of the petition presented at the Tribunal by Hope Uzodinma.
Ever since David Mark V. ABUBAKAR USMAN, and DOMA V. INEC, the law
has been settled that neither collation officers nor a returning
officer, has the power in law to exclude a polling unit result duly
signed by the presiding officer at the polling unit; only the
election tribunal possesses the power to cancel or exclude such a
result. So, at the point of its presentation, Senator Uzodinma’s
petition was potentially viable, in spite of the apparent
dubiousness of the polling units results on which it was anchored,
there being a REBUTTABLE presumption of regularity and correctness,
by virtue of both the Electoral Act and Evidence Act, enuring in
favour of any result declared by a presiding officer.

The backbreaking and fatal error made by Ihedioha’s legal team
was in not filing a CROSS PETITION fiercely challenging the
integrity of the suspect polling units results upon which Uzodinma
was relying, and praying the election tribunal to formally nullify
the said results. Without a cross petition, none of the grounds
under section 138 (1) of the Electoral Act for questioning the
elections conducted in those polling units in which Uzodinma “won”
could have been competently raised by Governor Ihedioha in his
defence to Uzodinma’s petition. This was the ratio decidendi of the
old Court of Appeal decision in IDRIS V. A.N.P.P.(2008)8
NWLR(PT.1088) Page 1. In the recent Court of Appeal decision in
ATIKU ABUBAKAR V. BUHARI, the Court of Appeal again invoked the
principle in dismissing Buhari’s contention that Atiku ABUBAKAR was
born in Cameroun to parents who originally were Camerounians, and
thus disqualified from contesting the election. Dismissing the
contention, the Court of Appeal held that the issue was
incompetent, since Buhari did not file a cross petition.

Ihedioha indeed did set up facts in his Reply to the petition
rehashing the serial infractions that led to the exclusion of the
results of the said 300 plus polling units. But that was legally
not enough, in the absence of a cross petition. Besides, such
renditions by a Respondent in a mere Reply or Statement of Defence
are clearly incompetent. The reason for the incompetence was was
made clear by the Court of Appeal in NATIONAL JUDICIAL COUNCIL &
ORS V. HON. JUSTICE JUBRIL BABAJIDE ALADEJANA & ORS(2014) LPELR –
2413 (CA) Page 31, paras C – F, at ratio 3 thus –

“The law is that it is a plaintiff who by his statement of claim
primarily nominates issues to be tried in a suit and which he
relies on to have the judgment of the Court. For a defendant, it is
only necessary to resist the plaintiff’s claim on the facts
pleaded. It is not for a defendant to set up facts which would
convey that it is not just setting up a defence but setting up a
new case of his own. He can only do so by way of a counter
claim…”

Shorn of the legalese, what the above authority is simply saying
is that since the issue nominated for trial by Hope Uzodinma was
the unlawfulfulness or otherwise of the exclusion of the results of
the 300 plus polling units by the ward collation officers,
Ihedioha’s defence was therefore necessarily restricted by law to
showing that those who excluded the results had the power in law to
exclude them. Without a cross petition praying for the
nullification of those results, the law forbade Governor Ihedioha
as respondent from raising the issue of the alleged serial corrupt
practices and irregularities marring the said results, in a mere
statement of defence; that was a new issue not nominated by
Uzodinma as petitioner. Ihedioha, being a Respondent, could only
have competently raised them via a cross petition, being a new
issue not nominated by Uzodinma, the petitioner.

Tragically, Ihedioha’s legal team forgot to include the pivotal
cross petition. And in the absence of a cross petition, the Supreme
Court was right in law, painfully though it may seem, to rely on
the presumption of regularity and correctness enshrined by both the
Electoral Act and Evidence Act in favour of the said results, and
to reckon with them and add them up to the final result, since
Ihedioha’s legal team had woefully failed to effectively attack the
results and rebut that presumption. For the Supreme Court, this was
the legally correct conclusion to come to, having found that INEC
had no power in law to exclude polling units results duly affirmed
by the various polling units presiding officers!

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