Lagos state governorship tribunal has dismissed the petition of Abdul-Azeez Adediran, the PDP governorship candidate, challenging the election of the All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate, Babajide Sanwo-Olu as Governor of the state.
Gatekeepers News reports that Jandor had filed petitions to challenge the declaration, saying Sanwo-Olu did not secure the most valid votes.
Also, the PDP candidate in his petition argued that Sanwo-Olu’s deputy, Hamzat and the Labour Party candidate in the election were not qualified to participate in the election.
The Independent National Electoral Commission had declared Sanwo-Olu as the winner of the March 18, 2023 governorship election in the state. Sanwo-Olu received 762,134 votes, Rhodes-Vivour emerged second with 312,329 votes and Jide Adediran (Jandor) of the PDP finished third with 62,449 votes.
Subsequently, Labour Party’s Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour and Jandor had filed petitions to challenge the declaration of the electoral body.
A member of the tribunal’s three-member panel, Justice Mikail Abdullahi, dismissed the petition based on several preliminary objections.
The first argument was whether the deputy governor, Obafemi Hamzat, should be considered a separate candidate from Babajide Sanwo-Olu and if he could be included as a respondent in the case. The tribunal cited previous decisions and ruled that a petition should be filed between the winner and loser of an election, not between two individuals who both lost.
Furthermore, the tribunal ruled that the name of the 5th and 6th respondent, Rhodes-Vivour, and the Labour Party should not have been named as a respondent in Jandor and the PDP’s case, and subsequently, the party’s name was removed from the petition.
