PEPC: Action Alliance withdraws suit against Tinubu’s victory

The Action Alliance (AA), one of the opposition political parties challenging the Bola Tinubu victory in the Feb. 25 Presidential Election, has withdrawn its petition.

Counsel to AA, Oba Maduabuchi-Ume, SAN, told the Presidential Elections Petition Court (PEPC) sitting in Abuja on Monday that a motion for withdrawal had been filed to the effect.

Our correspondent reports that the five-member panel is headed by Justice Haruna Tsammani.

Following Maduabuchi-Ume’s application, the court consequently struck out the petition.

Maduabuchi-Ume told the newsmen in an interview that he acted on the instruction of the party.

Meanwhile, the National Chairman of AA, Dr Adekunle Omo-Aje, while briefing the newsmen shortly after the withdrawal of the petition, said questions had been asked repeatedly about their motives and reasons for withdrawal of the petition.

“To make the answers available once and for all, for all that care to know, we will avail you the straight reasons behind our actions here now.

“We believe that this our address to you today will put to rest, whatever insinuation anybody may have had,” he said.

According to him, to start with, our party, Action Alliance was neither challenging emergence of Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu nor the victory of APC in this instance, but protesting the process adopted by the umpire – INEC, in the build up to the election.

“Our grouse is with INEC and its approach to Issues that concerns our party spanning over months buildup to the elections.

“We have all reasons to be aggrieved with the snobbish treatment, and underrating approach of the umpire towards our complaints as touching the induced crisis in our party,” he said.

Omo-Aje said the party’s grouse for approaching the Court of Appeal Presidential Tribunal was to show to the world the partisanship tendencies of INEC that maliciously worked against their party in conjunction with some political mafia to exclude it from participating in all the elections so far conducted.

He said INEC was aware through many court judgments up to the Supreme Court decisions acknowledging him as authentic national chairman of AA.

He said the commission practically created a parallel AA “leadership at its headquarters using one Kenneth Udeze as its personal national chairman.”

“It is this Udeze that INEC allowed to field candidates for our party, and rejected the authentic list co-signed by me as national chairman and Amb. Suleiman Abdulrasheed as national secretary.”

He, however said that well-meaning Nigerians, home and in the Diaspora, including leaders of Afenifere, Ohaneze, the Arewa, the Middle-Belt Forum, captains of industries and community leaders, urged them to see the loss of the party as their own contribution to the unity of the country.

Omo-Aje said the party resolved to withdraw the petition considering the unity of the nation.

“Being witnesses and active members of the imbroglio that followed the annulment of the result of the famous June 12, 1993 Presidential elections believed to have been won by late Chief MKO Abiola, of the Southwest extraction, we do not want to be the reason our country – Nigeria will be thrown into another horrific experience of such.

“Secondly, as active democrats in this democratic experiment, we shall not be used by proponents of Interim Government to achieve their concocted agenda of taken over government through the back door.

“Thirdly, our party believe in the three key principles of a healthy democracy, which are: equity, fairness and justice.

“The agitations around our country today is because parts or all of these key principles have been relegated,” he said.

He said the party also considered those who participated and won elections in the polls.

Besides, he said the party also believed in the ability of “Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, being a proponent of restructuring, which has been one major reason why we have the barrage of agitation in our land today, to evolve a kind of policy that could engender resurgence of trust in our togetherness as a national entity.”

“Truth be told, our country – Nigeria today, is at the precipice.

“We need a personality that believe in policies that can repose trust in the aggrieved indigenous nationalities within Nigeria to reenact the loss of brotherliness among our diverse ethnicity,” he said.