OSUN: Is Tribunal Wrong To Sack Adekele?

Exactly 61 days after he was sworn in as the Governor of Osun State, Senator Ademola Adeleke has been sacked from office by the State’s Governorship Election Petition Tribunal on Friday.

The Justice Terste Kume-led tribunal voided the result of the July 16, 2022 election where the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) declared that Adeleke polled 403,371 votes to defeat the then-incumbent governor, Gboyega Oyetola, who scored 375,027 votes.

Kume, while delivering the majority rule of the three-member panel, held that the governorship election was characterized by over-voting and that the reviewed result put Adeleke’s votes at 290, 266 while Oyetola had 314, 921 votes.

The tribunal consequently directed INEC to withdraw Adeleke’s certificate of return and recognize Ggboyega as the duly elected governor of the state. Both are the respective candidates of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the All Progressives Congress (APC). However, a member of the panel disagreed with the decision made by the two other justices.

Electoral Act’s Position On Over-Voting

Signed into law on February 25, 2022 by President Muhammadu Buhari, the Electoral Act, 2022 is the legal framework that empowers INEC to oversee elections in Nigeria.

The Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) machine is one of the important technological innovations introduced by INEC to authenticate if a person that turns up for voting during elections is captured in the national database of voters.

It is meant to eliminate or reduce to the barest minimum the issue of over-voting through the accreditation of voters during elections.

Section 51 of the Act instructs that the total number of accredited voters will become a factor in determining over-voting at election tribunals and stipulates the cancellation of the entire result of a polling unit when it is established that the total number of votes cast exceeds the number of accredited voters.

Subsection (2) of that Section states, “Where the number of votes cast at an election in any polling unit exceeds the number of accredited voters in that polling unit, the Presiding officer shall cancel the result of the election in that polling unit.

Subsection (3) provides that, “Where the result of an election is cancelled in accordance with subsection (2), there shall be no return for the election until another poll has taken place in the affected polling unit.

In subsection (4), the Act states that “Notwithstanding the provisions of subsections (2) and (3) the Commission may, if satisfied that the result of the election will not substantially be affected by voting in the area where the election is cancelled, direct that a return of the election be made.”

Oyetola and APC had in the case filed by their lawyers Lateef Fagbemi and Akin Olujimi, named INEC as the first defendant, Adeleke the second defendant and PDP as the third defendant.

The electoral commission did not immediately return THE WHISTLER’s request for comment on the development.