President Bola Tinubu and Vice President Kashim Shettima have urged the Supreme Court to dismiss an appeal by the Allied Peoples Movement (APM) challenging Shettima’s nomination as Tinubu’s running mate in the last presidential election, describing it as a waste of judicial time.
Tracknews media reports that the APM had, in its petition before the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC), claimed that Shettima violated the Electoral Act by having double nominations as candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) for Borno Central Senatorial District and as vice presidential candidate.
The PEPC dismissed the petition for lack of merit, holding that the issue of nomination was an internal affair of a party and a pre-election issue over which it lacked jurisdiction.
In their joint respondents’ brief filed in APM’s appeal before the Supreme Court, Tinubu and Shettima argued that the PEPC’s decision was correct and should be affirmed. They noted that the Supreme Court had previously settled the issue of double nominations in its judgment in a case filed by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) against INEC and others.
Tinubu and Shettima also faulted the case presented before the Supreme Court by the APM, which they noted was a departure from what they argued before the PEPC. They accused the APM of abusing the court process by filing a frivolous appeal.
“At the risk of sounding repetitive, this appeal ought not to have been filed at all,” they argued in their brief. “Assuming the petition at the lower court was filed out of human error or inadvertence, prudence demanded its immediate withdrawal after sighting the judgment of the Supreme Court, which settled the sole issue contained herein, assuming any triable issue is therein contained.”
