Osun State chapter of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) on Tuesday filed their replies to the petition of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and Governor Gboyega Oyelola as required by the rules of the election petition tribunal petition.
In the responses, they told the tribunal that all the allegations in the petition are lame and imaginary.
The commission and party in their separate replies to the APC/Oyetola petition maintained that the election was free, fair and credible without any iota of non-compliance with the Electoral Act, 2022 and prayed the tribunal to dismiss the petition for it is frivolous, baseless and un-meritorious.
They claimed that Senator Ademola Adeleke fulfilled all qualification criteria and conditions to run for the election and was duly declared the winner, insisting that there was no over-voting in any of the polling units being challenged by Oyetola and his APC.
The PDP further maintained that “it is fully prepared to defend its mandate to show to all and sundry that the election petition filed by the APC and Governor Oyelola is time wasting because it was brought in dead and you will see at the end of the day.”
Secretary of the legal committee of the party, Hasim Abioye who was in the company of some party chieftains and witnesses while filing the reply at the Osun State High Court, the venue of the tribunal, remarked: “Well, as you can see we are before the election petition tribunal, PDP is set to file her own reply to the petition of the APC and Governor Oyelola as required by the rules, the witnesses must be present physically before the secretary to the tribunal to sign their witness statements on oath.
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“So, all these people here are witnesses and they have come to show themselves before the secretary that they are ready to sign their witnesses statement on oath.
“We have twenty-one days ultimatum to file our reply but this is the fourteenth day and to show that we are ever ready as fit as a fiddle, we are ever ready as a boy scout to tell you that we are not running anywhere.
“I think, we have more than a hundred as you can see here and others are still coming so I can tell you that for us to be able to line up and with others still coming we are fully prepared to defend this mandate to show to you that the election petition filed by the APC and Governor Oyelola is time wasting because it was brought in dead and you will see at the end of the day.”
When asked of the exact number of witnesses, he explained, “we will not tell you the exact number but we are more than a hundred.
“When you see the processes you can approach the tribunal to see the list of the lawyers on the processes when they are eventually made available to the public but, I can tell you that we are confident of victory and like I always say, the petition is time wasting and in fact, it is an empty shell.”
“Yes, we are confident that the tribunal will do justice to this. You know they’ve made so much hype about service on the governor-elect, you know the security situation in Ede and so if we are in the state aftermath the election you can see security breaches here and there, so, the administration that has not been able to secure the state properly we cannot just open the gate of the governor-elect for just anybody to walk in and that is why the law has made provision for substituted service.
“It is part of our jurisprudence and if there’s no provision for it in our jurisprudence, we say that is not normal. I’ve never seen any election petition where the petitioner has been able to serve the governor-elect personally.”
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