The Presidential Elections Petitions Tribunal has on Monday, August 26, 2019, set judgement in the Atiku vs Buhari case for a date not later than September 13, 2019.
This according to reports is because the initial date of September 15 is no longer realistic as it is a Sunday.
According to Section 134 (1) to (3) of the Electoral Act, it provides that an election petition should be filed, heard and determined within 180 days. The section was inserted into the Electoral Act following a situation where election petitions took up to four years before being resolved, leading to the disruption of the political process in the country.
According to the source, ‘’the petition of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, presidential candidate in the February 23 presidential election, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar and his party, will be decided before September 15.
‘’They (the tribunal) cannot go beyond that date in deciding the petition one way or the other because, by law, that is how far they can go in the case. They can’t sit beyond that day. They are not permitted to do so by law. The 180 days stipulated by the law will elapse that day,’’ he said.
Recall that when Atiku filed his petition on March 18, 2019, he told the tribunal that he and his party had assembled about 400 witnesses to prove his case against President Muhammadu Buhari, the candidate of the All Progressives Congress, APC, who was declared the winner of the election by the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC.
The tribunal headed by Justice Mohammed Garba began its sitting on May 7 after much drama and reserved the petition for judgement on August 21 after arguments from both parties had been heard.
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