Atiku And Obi Accuse Tinubu Of Evading Petition Service, Court Rules In Their Favor

The Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC) in Abuja ordered on Friday that the President-elect, Bola Tinubu, should be served with copies of petitions seeking to nullify his election through substituted means.

The court directed that the petitions should be served on Tinubu through his political party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), following separate ex-parte applications brought before the court by the candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku Abubakar, and his counterpart in the Labour Party, Peter Obi.

The two accused Tinubu of deliberately avoiding the service of their petitions on him and making himself elusive to frustrate their effort to hand him copies of the petition. The petitioners sought the intervention of the court, relying on various constitutional provisions and the Electoral Act.

The court granted the ex-parte applications of both Atiku and Obi, as well as that of the Allied Peoples Movement (APM), to serve their petitions on Tinubu through substituted means. The court had earlier ordered the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to grant Tinubu access to all the electoral materials used for the presidential poll to enable him to prepare to defend his election victory.