President-elect Asiwaju Bola Tinubu’s camp has revealed that it would be absurd for him to respond to the petitions lodged with the electoral tribunal by Labor Party presidential candidate Peter Obi and his People’s Democratic Party counterpart Atiku Abubakar . if he has not been served notice of termination.
The development comes five days after Obi formally submitted his petition to the Electoral Court to protest the February 25 election result.
Obi’s petition came four weeks after the contentious presidential and national assembly elections that produced the president-elect.
Unfortunately, the notice was not delivered to Tinubu before he left the country for a holiday in France last week, according to Tinubu Presidential Campaign Council legal director Babatunde Ogala.
The PDP and LP candidates had both accused Tinubu of intentionally avoiding service of their petitions and told the court that several attempts to serve the petitions on the APC candidate had proved unsuccessful.
His action prompted the Abuja-based electoral court to order Obi and Atiku to serve him with copies of petitions aimed at having his election nullified by substitute means, most notably by his political party, the All Progressives Congress.
In a phone conversation with our correspondent, Yunusa Tanko, the main spokesman for the Obi-Datti Presidential Campaign Council, expressed his disappointment that the recent vacation trip was Tinubu’s idea to avoid newspaper delivery.
He said: “You deliberately foiled the process. This man (Tinubu) practically ran out of the country after evading communication. But our party will deliver the notification through the APC to him. I’m sure they must have received it by now.”
When asked about the date by which Tinubu’s legal team hopes to respond to Obi and Atiku’s petitions, Ogala insisted that no notification had been served on them.
“How can we set a date for this? We will submit our response before the deadline,” he said.
As for whether Tinubu intentionally left the country to avoid receiving the notification and whether his absence would delay the process as speculated, Ogala debunked the claim.
“That’s wrong. In fact, a copy of the petition hasn’t been served to Tinubu as of this morning. They didn’t order alternate service until Friday. So they have to serve him. The earliest they can serve is Monday, and he has 21 days from then.
“So if you haven’t served someone, you can’t expect them to respond. Until the copy of the petition is delivered to us, our time begins to count,” he said.
