A Federal High Court in Abuja on Monday reserved judgment in a suit challenging Senator Sunday Steve Karimi’s victory in the All Progressives Congress (APC) primary for the Kogi West Senatorial District, after defence lawyers urged the court to throw out the case as statute-barred and accused the plaintiff of building his claim on faulty results.
Justice Salim Ibrahim did not give a date for the judgment, saying only that the parties would be notified, after hearing arguments from all sides in the suit filed by Aro Samuel Bamidele over the party’s May 18 primary.
Bamidele is asking the court to declare him the winner of the primary and to set aside the APC’s submission of Karimi’s name to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) as its candidate for next year’s senatorial election in Kogi West. The APC, Karimi and INEC are the defendants.
The case was first filed in the court’s Lokoja division and was later moved to Abuja on grounds of insecurity.
Lawyers for Karimi, the APC and INEC all questioned the competence of the suit, arguing that it was filed outside the time allowed by law.
John Olusola Baiyeshea (SAN), counsel to Karimi, said the primary took place on May 18 and Karimi’s name was submitted to INEC on June 29, but Bamidele did not file his suit until late July. That, he said, was well beyond the 14 days allowed for pre-election matters under Section 285(9) of the Constitution.
He argued that the settled position of the law is that time runs from the date of the event, not from the date a plaintiff says he learned of it. In this case, he said, the relevant date was the day of the primary, not the day Bamidele became aware that Karimi’s name had gone to INEC.
Baiyeshea also attacked the substance of Bamidele’s claim to victory, telling the court the plaintiff’s results were unreliable and had been disowned by the party.
“In their haste to compile results, they added the result of President Tinubu’s presidential election along with that of the senatorial primary. And the party (APC) denied that it was their results,” he said. “The party has disowned the results that the plaintiff is parading.”
He said the ward agents’ names the plaintiff submitted were those used in the House of Representatives primary, not the senatorial contest, and that the names Karimi submitted were the authentic ones. “We got our results from the party,” he said.
Baiyeshea further told the court that Bamidele had withdrawn from the process before the primary. According to him, the plaintiff announced the withdrawal on his social media handle days before the vote. “Having withdrawn from the process before the election, he stood no chance of winning the election,” he said.
A. G. Ivom, counsel to the APC, spoke in a similar vein, saying nothing before the court showed that the plaintiff won the primary. He added that the party that conducted the exercise compiled the actual results, not INEC, which only witnessed the primary and wrote reports on it. Dayo Akinlaja (SAN), appearing for INEC, also urged the court to dismiss the suit as statute-barred.
Bamidele’s lawyer, Johnson Usman (SAN), rejected the defendants’ arguments, saying there was ample evidence, including results his client obtained from INEC, that Bamidele won the primary. He conceded that the inclusion of President Bola Tinubu’s results in the figures his client tendered was an error, but said it was not fatal to the case.
Usman asked the court to declare Bamidele the winner and to order INEC to publish his name as the APC’s candidate for the senatorial district.
