S/Court Reserves Judgment On Nasarawa Guber

By Garry Ochigbo, Edited By Grace Namiji

The Supreme Court on Tuesday reserved judgment in the legal battle on the governorship election of Nasarawa State.

The legal battle is between the incumbent governor, Abdullahi Sule of the All Progressives Congress, APC and the People’s Democratic Party PDP and its governorship candidate, Emmanuel David Ombugadu.

At Tuesday’s proceedings, lead counsel to PDP and its governorship candidate, Kanu Agabi appealed to the apex court to set aside the November 23 judgment of the Court of Appeal which upheld Sule as the lawfully elected governor.

In its place, Agabi, a former Attorney General of the Federation and Minister of Justice canvassed that the October 2, 2023 judgment of the Nasarawa State Governorship Election Petitions Tribunal granted in favour of PDP and Ombugadu be restored.

Agabi specifically called on the Supreme Court to allow the votes of Nasarawa state people to count and be meaningful be declaring PDP and Ombugadu as winners as rightly done by the Tribunal.

APC lawyers, led by Akin Olujinmi while adopting his brief of arguments asked the apex court to carefully look into the cited authorities to back up their request for dismissal of the case.

After taking arguments from lawyers, Justice Kekere-Ekun announced that judgment has been reserved and that the date for its delivery would be communicated to the parties involved.

The Appeal Court had on November 23 last year reversed the sack of Gov Sule by the State Election Petitions Tribunal in its judgment delivered on October 2.

In a judgment delivered by Justice Uchechukwu Onyemenam, the Court of Appeal had said the Tribunal was legally bound to act on witness statements filed along with the petition or front-loaded within the 21 days stipulated by law.

The Court held that no petition can lawfully be amended outside the 21 days allowed by law as wrongly done by the Tribunal.

The Court also dismissed the over-voting issues used to annul the election, adding that the allegations were not established by law.

INEC had declared Sule the winner of the governorship election on the grounds that he polled a total of 347,209 votes to defeat his closest opponent David Emmanuel Ombugadu who secured 283,016 votes.