Election court steps down Obi’s petition over poor scheduling of documents

The Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC) for the third time this week, has been forced to step down hearing in the petition filed by Mr Peter Obi and the Labour Party due to poor scheduling of documents.

Obi and his party are before the election petition court challenging the election of President Bola Tinubu and the Vice-President, Mr Kashim Shettima.

The Chairman of the court, Justice Haruna Tsammani, at the resumed hearing on Thursday, had to step the petition down.

This was on account of poor scheduling of documents the petitioners sought to tender to prove their allegation of electoral malpractices during the Feb. 25 presidential election.

At Thursday’s proceedings, the court observed that the documents were not properly scheduled as it had ordered counsel to do.

There was some confusion as a lot of discrepancies were noticed as Mr Emeka Okpko, SAN from the Obi legal team attempted to tender documents from the 23 local government areas of Benue.

All efforts to reconcile the discrepancies and reschedule the documents were futile forcing the judges to rise for about 15 minutes to allow the petitioners rectify the confusion.

The court asked Okpoko to rather file a different schedule of documents he had prepared which the court said was easier to understand than the earlier filed schedule.

The five Justices then retired to their chambers to await the time the legal team would put its house in order.

Our correspondent reports that all this confusion happened right in the presence of Obi, his running mate, Mr Datti Baba-Ahmed, the suspended Chairman of the party, Mr Julius Abure and other Labour Party members.