PDP petitions NJC over judgment nullifying its Kogi guber primary

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has written the National Judicial Council (NJC) over what it called the “display of unethical conduct by the Kogi State High Court in declaring our state primary election invalid.”

It also vowed to restore the validity of the exercise through an appeal.

Justice John Olorunfemi had last Thursday declared as invalid the party’s governorship primary which held on September 3 and 4, 2019.

But the political grouping contended that “the pre-election suit filed in the Kogi High Court by only one of our many aspirants in the primary, Alhaji Abubakar Mohammed Ibrahim, only sought the court to declare him the winner of the primary election.

“All the parties agreed that the primary was valid and concluded. The only contention between Engineer Musa Wada and Abubakar Mohammed Ibrahim was to determine who the actual winner was and nothing more.”

Briefing journalists yesterday in Abuja, PDP’s National Publicity Secretary, Kola Ologbondiyan, also refuted claims that his party had backpedalled on its appeal seeking a review of the Supreme Court ruling on the Imo governorship election, clarifying that they were not challenging the authority of the apex court as the final arbiter in judicial matters.

According to the main opposition party, the issue at stake “is about the fact that the apex court was misled to give the verdict it gave,” adding that it now had the fact to substantiate the position.

The spokesman submitted: “The reason we went to the Supreme Court is to state clearly that they were misled by the All Progressives Congress (APC) into giving their judgment”.

“We are at the Supreme Court to state clearly that the votes the apex court declared for the APC are even more than the total number of registered voters. And that the highest court in the land was misled into taking that decision.”

Ologbondiyan observed: “We are not confronting the Supreme Court as a political party, No. The PDP and our candidate, Rt. Hon. Emeka Ihedioha, who has a chequered history of political participation in Nigeria and who has had the opportunity of leading the House that has the constitutional responsibility to make law, will not go like that. And our party that nurtured democracy for over 20 years will not confront the Supreme Court.”

On the Kogi issue, the party described the judgment as “a classical example of judicial rascality and a scandalous travesty of justice which cannot stand, and for which our party will stop at nothing in exploring all legal avenues to immediately set it aside at the appellate courts.”

It alleged that the verdict had “heavily detracted from the integrity of the Kogi High Court and threatens the reputation of the entire institution of the judiciary if not immediately quashed.”

The party went on: “It is completely unimaginable that a court of law will allow itself to be railroaded into a voyage to the void, to the extent that it stood the law on its head by importing and pronouncing reliefs on matters that were not before it or even pleaded by any of the parties; to wit, a declaration on the validity of PDP Kogi state governorship election primary.”