Prof. Ben Nwabueze (SAN), a foremost constitutional lawyer on Thursday said majority of Nigerians believed that the 2019 presidential election which produced President Muhammadu Buhari was manipulated and rigged.
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87-year-old Nwabueze made the comment when he made a brief appearance before the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal (PEPT) in Abuja, announcing himself as the leader of the legal team for the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and its presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar.
The former Minister of Education and Youth Development who was brought in on a wheelchair, later read a prepared speech before the commencement of proceedings and took his leave about 30 minutes later.
Nwabueze, who was allowed to address the tribunal while sitting, said his appearance was to underscore the importance of the case for the nation’s democratic development.
Parts of his address read “The February/March General Elections have come and gone, but the generality of Nigerians seem agreed that something was wrong with them, particularly the February presidential election”.
“They suspect that the latter was manipulated or, in more familiar language , rigged. What is not known is how or by whom the rigging was done. an Election tribunal /court is now saddled with the task , an intractable task of finding the truth about what happened”.
“The task before it is made intractable by what Justice Kishna Iyer of the Indian Supreme Court referred to as “the tyranny of procedure, the horror of the doctrine of precedent, with its stifling and deadening insistence on uniformity, and the booby traps of pleadings” .
“The decided election cases show the Eletion Tribunal/Court to have succumbed all too readily to these constraining factors, but Nigerians still expect it to rise above the self-imposed shackles in order to find out the truth about what happened during that election”.
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