Obi’s failure at PEPC was because he didn’t pay polling unit agents, Apapa faction claims

The Lamidi Apapa branch of the Labour Party (LP) has asserted that the failure to pay party agents prevented the National Chairman of the party, Julius Abure, and Peter Obi from providing results of polling units to the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal.

In an interview with The PUNCH, the spokesperson for the group, Abayomi Arabambi, stated this.

According to Arabambi, when the party failed to give them their promised salary of N10,000, the majority of the agents allegedly fled with the polling unit result sheets.

He called Obi’s intention to challenge the tribunal’s ruling a waste of time and resources.

“Ab initio, no (polling) agent was paid and I remember telling Nigerians it is something that may affect us after the election. None of my agents was paid. Out of the over 190,000 polling units, we only presented to INEC that we have agents in over 130,000. The remaining was not uploaded. Even in the 130,000 we had no agent submitted his polling unit result to Peter Obi. We owed them N10,000 each,” he said.

“These people are not going to tell the world this truth. That was why the judges asked if we expected them to go and gather evidence for us from the market. You went to court without Form EC8 and those lawyers were unable to tabulate the total number of votes that Obi claimed he garnered. Those respected judges were so thorough and nobody should abuse them. They were only asking questions in line with the relevant Electoral Act and Constitution of Nigeria.

“If you were claiming you have the majority of votes counted, what did you score? They couldn’t tabulate or present it in line with the extant law of the land. That was what provoked the judges to even demand Obi’s actual score. Had it been they had the polling unit results, they could have gone ahead with the presentation to prove that LP had certain votes in some states. In this case, we know INEC cannot alter your Form EC8 except theirs. But had it been we paid all our agents, we wouldn’t have this problem.

“We have accepted Wednesday’s verdict at the tribunal and we are going back to the drawing board. Obi’s insistence on going to the Supreme Court despite the avalanche of exposition LP was subjected to at the Court of Appeal is quite unfortunate. He deserves our pity though.

“I believe that going to the Supreme Court is just a sheer waste of time. The apex court is not a court of first instance in the presidential election. The Appeal Court is and his lawyers need to tell him. If they fail to tell him, I am reminding Obi now that no fresh documents will be allowed in the Supreme Court. It is what you have that they are going to debate. No new thing can be introduced.”

He further stated that it would be a waste of time if Obi raised the issue of double nominations by Vice President Kashim Shettima because the case has been settled at the apex court.