The Lagos State Governorship Election Petitions Tribunal has affirmed Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu as the rightfully elected governor of the state in the 2023 gubernatorial elections, a report from Channels TV confirms.
Justice Mikail Abdullahi, reading the unanimous judgment on behalf of the three-man tribunal panel, dismissed the petitions filed by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and their governorship candidate, Olajide Adediran, popularly known as Jandor.
The tribunal struck out the names of Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour, the Labour Party candidate and the party itself, on the grounds that they should not have been included as respondents in the petitions submitted by Jandor and the PDP. This led to the removal of all evidence and exhibits related to the Labour Party from the tribunal’s records.
The tribunal’s deliberations began with an examination of the preliminary objections raised by the involved parties before moving on to consider the substantive issues at hand.
A key question for the tribunal’s deliberation was the validity of the nominations of Sanwo-Olu and his deputy, Obafemi Hamzat, by the All Progressives Congress (APC) to compete in the election. The tribunal invoked pertinent sections of the Constitution and the Electoral Act, along with a range of legal precedents, to assert that the matter constituted a pre-election concern unrelated to the election’s conduct itself.
Furthermore, the tribunal ruled that the petitioners were not affiliated with the APC, and therefore lacked the legal standing to challenge the party’s primary process that led to the nomination of both candidates.
In its concluding statement, the tribunal declared that the petition lacked merit and was subsequently dismissed. “I affirm the election and return of Babajide Olusola Sanwo-Olu as the duly elected governor of Lagos State,” Justice Abdullahi concluded.
