The Ebonyi State Election Petitions Tribunal sitting in Abuja, Wednesday, declared Francis Nwifuru as the duly elected governor of Ebonyi state.
Delivering its judgment, the three-man panel of the tribunal chaired by Justice O. Lekan held that the issue of nomination and sponsorship by a political party, being a pre-election matter, should have been challenged before the Federal High Court before the election.
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), it will be recalled, had announced Francis Nwifuru winner of the poll with 199,131 votes at the gubernatorial election held on March 18, 2023.
Chukwuma Ifeanyi Odii of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) came second with 80,191 votes.
But Odii and PDP rejected the outcome and vowed to challenge it.
They subsequently approached the Tribunal seeking the nullification of Nwifuru’s election on the grounds of non-compliance with the Electoral Act 2022 and alleged failure to score the majority of lawful votes cast at the guber poll.
Odii and the PDP legal team argued that the governor was at the time of the election, not qualified to contest the election on the platform of the APC because he was still a member of the People’s Democratic Party.
But the Nwifuru’s party, the All Progressives Congress (APC) in a letter submitted before the Tribunal stated that the governor resigned from the PDP while serving as speaker of the state House of Assembly, and defected to the APC before its primary election.
The Tribunal then declined jurisdiction to entertain the grounds of Nwifuru’s sponsorship of APC, saying it was an internal political party matter.
It held: “Membership of a political party is a non justiciable issue.”
Earlier, the tribunal had dismissed the petition brought by the All Progressive Grand Alliance (APGA) and its candidate, Bernard Odoh on similar grounds.
