Two documents submitted by an official of the National Independent
Electoral Commission (INEC) may jeopardize Senate President Bukola
Saraki's political future, according to our legal correspondent
monitoring the sitting of the National Assembly Election Petition
Tribunal in Ilorin, the Kwara State capital.
by SAHARAREPORTERS, NEW YORK Oct 02, 2015
153 74 226
Two documents submitted by an official of the National Independent
Electoral Commission (INEC) may jeopardize Senate President Bukola
Saraki's political future, according to our legal correspondent
monitoring the sitting of the National Assembly Election Petition
Tribunal in Ilorin, the Kwara State capital. Bukola Saraki declaring
himself winner of Senatorial election
Tagged “Exhibit D1” and “Exhibit D2,” the two documents, declaring Mr.
Saraki the winner, were both signed on March 28, 2015, the same day
elections were held. “The documents clearly suggest falsification of
results, because it was not until two days later that INEC began to
declare the results,” said a legal expert who inspected the documents
that were obtained by SaharaReporters.
The two controversial documents were admitted in evidence by the
tribunal led by Justice Joshua Majebi. After reviewing the documents,
legal experts described them as “a bizarre but unintended act of
political self-immolation.”
Mr. Hassan is a longstanding ally of Senator Saraki’s, and once served
as chief of staff to then Governor Saraki. In addition, Mr. Hassan
represented both the senator and the All Progressives Congress (APC) as a
party agent during the March 28, 2015 elections.
In an ironic twist, Mr. Hassan was the only witness called by the APC,
the second respondent in the electoral petition, to testify in Mr.
Saraki's favor. Senator Saraki neither appeared to testify for himself
nor did he call any other witness in his defense.
Abdulrahman Abdulrazaq of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), who was
declared the runner-up to Mr. Saraki, filed the petition against the
Senate President, the APC, and INEC. His lawsuit claims disputes INEC’s
declaration of Mr. Saraki as the winner of the Kwara Central Senatorial
District.
Mr. Abdulrazaq’s petition, argued by Francis Obumse of the law firm of
Ambali and Co., claims that Senator Saraki’s election did not comply
with various provisions of the Electoral Act as well as INEC's election
regulations and procedures. He also insists that he, not Senator Saraki,
scored a majority of the lawful votes cast at the election.
Mr. Abdulrazaq’s claims include widespread abuses in relation to the
electronic card reader used for voter accreditation and “deliberate
wrong entries (of votes)” by INEC staff. He is urging the tribunal to
annul Mr. Saraki's victory, and declare him as the genuine winner. In
the alternative, the petitioner seeks a cancellation of the election
altogether and a fresh poll.
In its response, Mr. Saraki’s legal team, which has 70 lawyers led by a
Senior Advocate of Nigeria Yusuf Ali, among them five Senior Advocates
of Nigeria, urged the tribunal to dismiss the petition, declaring it to
be unfounded and in violation of key provisions of court rules as well
as mandatory provisions of the Electoral Act.
The hearing began July 22, 2015, with Mr. Abdulrazaq testifying for
himself and calling three other witnesses, including Tunde Salako, the
head of INEC's legal unit in Kwara State, and Ms. Nkolly Obumse, a
Lagos-based forensic analyst, who provided a four-volume analysis of
voting materials and results from polling units.
At a hearing, Mrs. Obumse testified that the accreditation process was
flawed, adding that electronic card readers were widely by-passed. She
added that there were widespread over-voting and wrong entries of voting
scores in favor of Mr. Saraki.
But it was Mr. Hassan’s testimony, as the only witness called by the
APC, that threw up what a lawyer described as “a knotty and awkward
problem.”
Even though he testified that the election was hitch-free, the election
results tendered by Mr. Hassan, as Exhibit D1 and Exhibit D2, raised
questions. Our correspondent noted that Justice Majebi pointed to the
problem himself at the close of hearing when he asked the two sides to
advise the tribunal in their submissions.
At issue, according to Justice Majebi, was the fact that the two forms
tendered by Mr. Hassan, Exhibit D1, being the summary of results from
local government areas collation at senatorial district level, and
Exhibit D2, the “Declaration of Result of Election,” were both
apparently signed and dated on March 28, 2015—the very day of the
election.
In addition, only two persons, Mrs. Mulkah A. Ahmed, the collation and
returning officer, and Mr. Hassan, signed Exhibit D1. Other party agents
did not participate in the ostensible collation exercise.
Mrs. Ahmed also signed Exhibit D2, which contained the final results of
the election that declared Mr. Saraki as the validly elected candidate.
However, it remained unclear to whom she made the declaration or if she
posted it on INEC's notice board, as required by law. Neither the media
nor anybody else reported the declaration.
Since Mr. Abdulrazaq's petition was dated April 19, 2015, Justice
Majebi’s also raised the question of the tribunal’s competence to hear
the case since both section 134 (1) of the Electoral Act, 2010 and
section 285 (5) of the 1999 Constitution provide that an “election
petition shall be filed within 21 days after the date of the declaration
of results of the elections.” If the documents Mr. Hassan submitted are
declared valid, then the petition would fall one day outside the
statutory time frame.
Seizing on that prospect, Mr. Saraki's lawyers urged the tribunal to strike the petition against their client.
But our legal source wondered why Justice Majebi raised the contentious
matter at the close of evidence, but then refused to permit the
petitioner’s lawyers’ request to further scrutinize the issue.
“Depending on how the verdict goes, this development could raise
questions about fair hearing at appeal,” the source said.
The source added that the most significant development is that Mr.
Abdulrazaq's lawyers “have shown from several other election result
forms admitted by the tribunal that Exhibit D1 and Exhibit D2 were, in
effect, criminal forgeries.” The petitioner’s lawyers showed that the
collation of results was still going on at ward level in several places
across the senatorial district on March 29, 2015, even as Mrs. Ahmed and
Mr. Hassan had apparently prepared and declared the final election
results showing Mr. Saraki as the purported winner the day before.
Results announded by INEC
The credibility of the March 28 final return is further eroded by the
fact that nowhere throughout Nigeria did INEC announce any final
senatorial election return that day.
In fact, on March 30, 2015, Vanguard newspaper quoted Kwara INEC's
spokesman, Jacob Ayanda, as saying the previous day that the election
results would not be formally known until the next day, adding “only
(the) results from Isin and Oke-Ero out of the 16 local governments had
arrived [at] the Commission’s headquarters as at about 3 p.m.” on March
29, 2015.
“It was on that 30th March 2015 that the results of the Presidential and
National Assembly elections in Kwara State were indeed released by the
State's Presidential election Returning Officer and the Resident
Electoral Commissioner respectively. These were accordingly reported in
the media,” our source disclosed.
Our correspondent noted that Mr. Saraki was the first person to reveal
the results of the Kwara Central Senatorial election on his Facebook
page on the morning of March 30, accompanied with a picture of himself
holding for the camera what appears to be the election’s result sheet.
The same day, the senator released a statement at 19:24 through his
media aide, Bamikole Omishore, expressing his reaction to the results.
“How and why he and his lawyers now came to insist on the 28th March
2015 poll results remains to be explained,” said our source.
In their final written address, the petitioner's lawyers described the
March 28, 2015 results as fake and a nullity, adding that the tribunal
lacks the power to affirm or modify them. Citing a celebrated English
case decided by Lord Denning, they argued that the tribunal could not
build something on nothing.
Mr. Saraki's star-studded entourage of lawyers played down the troubling
significance of the dodgy documents, but did not offer any convincing
explanation for them. Instead, they argued that, even if the results
collated on March 29 were each deducted from the sum total votes of
118,879 for Saraki and 66,864 votes for Abdulrazaq, Mr. Saraki would
still be the winner.
Our legal expert stated that the Justice Majebi-led tribunal “must
resolve three key knotty issues without ultimately producing a legal
absurdity.” “One, the tribunal must resolve if it has power to
legitimize an essentially fraudulent and criminal act, as Exhibit D1 and
Exhibit D2 were arrived at in manifest breach of section 69 of the
Electoral Act, 2010 (as amended), which stipulates that all validly cast
votes for each candidate in an election must count before a return is
made. Two, if, in the face of clear contrary evidence, it still accepts
Exhibit D1 and Exhibit D2 as valid, it will have to strike out the
petition. And, three, if, on the other hand, it finds the exhibits to be
forgeries or illegal, it cannot simply proceed to ignore the fact and
rule against the petition on other grounds.”
A source close to Mr. Abdulrazaq’s lawyers told SaharaReporters that
their client would appeal if he loses, adding, “The merits of the
petition are not in question.” He added that the case should trigger a
criminal investigation both of Mrs. Ahmed and Mr. Hassan. “Once the
investigation takes off, you will see that Dr. Saraki was the instigator
of this clear fraudulent act.”
Given his skills as a political fighter, our legal analyst said he
expected Mr. Saraki to also file an appeal should he lose at the
tribunal. “The only thing that will stop him is the threat of criminal
investigation. I don’t think he would want to trigger a criminal
investigation into the conduct of Dr. (Mrs.) Ahmed and Alhaji Hassan,
which is certain to sweep him along. Section 124 (6) of the Electoral
Act, 2010 (as amended) is clear in this regard,” he said. According to
him, "the section stipulates that a candidate shall be deemed to have
committed an offence if it was committed with his knowledge and consent
or the knowledge and consent of a person who is acting under the general
or special authority of the candidate with reference to the election."
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