A former Minister of Justice and Attorney General of the Federation, Michael Aondoakaa, has criticised the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) for declaring the All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, as the winner of the 2023 presidential election.
Aondoakaa pointed out that this declaration was illegal, as Tinubu failed to meet the constitutionally required 25% of votes in the Federal Capital Territory.
The senior Nigerian advocate said this when he appeared on Arise TV at the weekend to discuss the outcome of the presidential and national assembly elections. He mentioned that in a similar case in 2008, the Supreme Court interpreted the word “and” conjunctively, making it mandatory for anyone aspiring to be the federation’s president.
According to him, the law has not changed since the case was decided, adding that it will be incumbent on the apex court to reinterpret that section of the Constitution again. In his words, “the Supreme Court has a right to defeat their previous decision or stand by it according to the doctrine of Stare Decisis”.
On Wednesday, INEC declared Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the APC candidate, the winner of the 2023 presidential election despite Nigerians’ outcry over the alleged massive rigging of the electoral process.
The former minister of justice said that the electoral umpire violated its own guidelines by failing to upload election results from the polling units directly to its server.
“The Supreme Court is conscious about a party following its own guidelines and how much more INEC whose guidelines have a constitutional flavour,” the learned silk said.
“They will need to have a good reason to be told to the tribunals why they deviated from their guidelines and they must justify that deviating from those guidelines did not invalidate the results,” he said.
He said the electoral umpire decided to change the goalpost in the middle of the game, insisting that this will be a serious issue to justify.
