Two documents submitted by an official
of the National Independent Electoral
Commission (INEC) may jeopardize
Senate President Bukola Saraki's political
future, according to our legal
correspondent monitoring the sitting of
the National Assembly Election Petition
Tribunal in Ilorin, the Kwara State
capital.

Tagged “Exhibit D1” and “Exhibit D2,” the two
documents, declaring Mr. Saraki the winner,
were both signed on March 28, 2015, the same
day elections were held. “The documents
clearly suggest falsification of results, because it
was not until two days later that INEC began to
declare the results,” said a legal expert who
inspected the documents that were obtained by
SaharaReporters.
The two controversial documents were
admitted in evidence by the tribunal led by
Justice Joshua Majebi. After reviewing the
documents, legal experts described them as “a
bizarre but unintended act of political self-
immolation.”
Mr. Hassan is a longstanding ally of Senator
Saraki’s, and once served as chief of staff to
then Governor Saraki. In addition, Mr. Hassan
represented both the senator and the All
Progressives Congress (APC) as a party agent
during the March 28, 2015 elections.
In an ironic twist, Mr. Hassan was the only
witness called by the APC, the second
respondent in the electoral petition, to testify in
Mr. Saraki's favor. Senator Saraki neither
appeared to testify for himself nor did he call
any other witness in his defense.
Abdulrahman Abdulrazaq of the Peoples
Democratic Party (PDP), who was declared the
runner-up to Mr. Saraki, filed the petition
against the Senate President, the APC, and
INEC. His lawsuit claims disputes INEC’s
declaration of Mr. Saraki as the winner of the
Kwara Central Senatorial District.
Mr. Abdulrazaq’s petition, argued by Francis
Obumse of the law firm of Ambali and Co.,
claims that Senator Saraki’s election did not
comply with various provisions of the Electoral
Act as well as INEC's election regulations and
procedures. He also insists that he, not Senator
Saraki, scored a majority of the lawful votes
cast at the election.
Mr. Abdulrazaq’s claims include widespread
abuses in relation to the electronic card reader
used for voter accreditation and “deliberate
wrong entries (of votes)” by INEC staff. He is
urging the tribunal to annul Mr. Saraki's victory,
and declare him as the genuine winner. In the
alternative, the petitioner seeks a cancellation
of the election altogether and a fresh poll.
In its response, Mr. Saraki’s legal team, which
has 70 lawyers led by a Senior Advocate of
Nigeria Yusuf Ali, among them five Senior
Advocates of Nigeria, urged the tribunal to
dismiss the petition, declaring it to be
unfounded and in violation of key provisions of
court rules as well as mandatory provisions of
the Electoral Act.
The hearing began July 22, 2015, with Mr.
Abdulrazaq testifying for himself and calling
three other witnesses, including Tunde Salako,
the head of INEC's legal unit in Kwara State,
and Ms. Nkolly Obumse, a Lagos-based forensic
analyst, who provided a four-volume analysis of
voting materials and results from polling units.
At a hearing, Mrs. Obumse testified that the
accreditation process was flawed, adding that
electronic card readers were widely by-passed.
She added that there were widespread over-
voting and wrong entries of voting scores in
favor of Mr. Saraki.
But it was Mr. Hassan’s testimony, as the only
witness called by the APC, that threw up what a
lawyer described as “a knotty and awkward
problem.”
Even though he testified that the election was
hitch-free, the election results tendered by Mr.
Hassan, as Exhibit D1 and Exhibit D2, raised
questions. Our correspondent noted that Justice
Majebi pointed to the problem himself at the
close of hearing when he asked the two sides to
advise the tribunal in their submissions.
At issue, according to Justice Majebi, was the
fact that the two forms tendered by Mr. Hassan,
Exhibit D1, being the summary of results from
local government areas collation at senatorial
district level, and Exhibit D2, the “Declaration of
Result of Election,” were both apparently signed
and dated on March 28, 2015—the very day of
the election.
In addition, only two persons, Mrs. Mulkah A.
Ahmed, the collation and returning officer, and
Mr. Hassan, signed Exhibit D1. Other party
agents did not participate in the ostensible
collation exercise.
Mrs. Ahmed also signed Exhibit D2, which
contained the final results of the election that
declared Mr. Saraki as the validly elected
candidate. However, it remained unclear to
whom she made the declaration or if she
posted it on INEC's notice board, as required by
law. Neither the media nor anybody else
reported the declaration.
Since Mr. Abdulrazaq's petition was dated April
19, 2015, Justice Majebi’s also raised the
question of the tribunal’s competence to hear
the case since both section 134 (1) of the
Electoral Act, 2010 and section 285 (5) of the
1999 Constitution provide that an “election
petition shall be filed within 21 days after the
date of the declaration of results of the
elections.” If the documents Mr. Hassan
submitted are declared valid, then the petition
would fall one day outside the statutory time
frame.
Seizing on that prospect, Mr. Saraki's lawyers
urged the tribunal to strike the petition against
their client.
But our legal source wondered why Justice
Majebi raised the contentious matter at the
close of evidence, but then refused to permit
the petitioner’s lawyers’ request to further
scrutinize the issue. “Depending on how the
verdict goes, this development could raise
questions about fair hearing at appeal,” the
source said.
The source added that the most significant
development is that Mr. Abdulrazaq's lawyers
“have shown from several other election result
forms admitted by the tribunal that Exhibit D1
and Exhibit D2 were, in effect, criminal
forgeries.” The petitioner’s lawyers showed that
the collation of results was still going on at ward
level in several places across the senatorial
district on March 29, 2015, even as Mrs. Ahmed
and Mr. Hassan had apparently prepared and
declared the final election results showing Mr.
Saraki as the purported winner the day before.

The credibility of the March 28 final return is
further eroded by the fact that nowhere
throughout Nigeria did INEC announce any final
senatorial election return that day.
In fact, on March 30, 2015, Vanguard
newspaper quoted Kwara INEC's spokesman,
Jacob Ayanda, as saying the previous day that
the election results would not be formally
known until the next day, adding “only (the)
results from Isin and Oke-Ero out of the 16 local
governments had arrived [at] the Commission’s
headquarters as at about 3 p.m.” on March 29,
2015.
“It was on that 30th March 2015 that the results
of the Presidential and National Assembly
elections in Kwara State were indeed released
by the State's Presidential election Returning
Officer and the Resident Electoral
Commissioner respectively. These were
accordingly reported in the media,” our source
disclosed.
Our correspondent noted that Mr. Saraki was
the first person to reveal the results of the
Kwara Central Senatorial election on his
Facebook page on the morning of March 30,
accompanied with a picture of himself holding
for the camera what appears to be the
election’s result sheet.
The same day, the senator released a
statement at 19:24 through his media aide,
Bamikole Omishore, expressing his reaction to
the results. “How and why he and his lawyers
now came to insist on the 28th March 2015 poll
results remains to be explained,” said our
source.
In their final written address, the petitioner's
lawyers described the March 28, 2015 results
as fake and a nullity, adding that the tribunal
lacks the power to affirm or modify them. Citing
a celebrated English case decided by Lord
Denning, they argued that the tribunal could not
build something on nothing.
Mr. Saraki's star-studded entourage of lawyers
played down the troubling significance of the
dodgy documents, but did not offer any
convincing explanation for them. Instead, they
argued that, even if the results collated on
March 29 were each deducted from the sum
total votes of 118,879 for Saraki and 66,864
votes for Abdulrazaq, Mr. Saraki would still be
the winner.
Our legal expert stated that the Justice Majebi-
led tribunal “must resolve three key knotty
issues without ultimately producing a legal
absurdity.” “One, the tribunal must resolve if it
has power to legitimize an essentially
fraudulent and criminal act, as Exhibit D1 and
Exhibit D2 were arrived at in manifest breach of
section 69 of the Electoral Act, 2010 (as
amended), which stipulates that all validly cast
votes for each candidate in an election must
count before a return is made. Two, if, in the
face of clear contrary evidence, it still accepts
Exhibit D1 and Exhibit D2 as valid, it will have to
strike out the petition. And, three, if, on the
other hand, it finds the exhibits to be forgeries
or illegal, it cannot simply proceed to ignore the
fact and rule against the petition on other
grounds.”
A source close to Mr. Abdulrazaq’s lawyers told
SaharaReporters that their client would appeal
if he loses, adding, “The merits of the petition
are not in question.” He added that the case
should trigger a criminal investigation both of
Mrs. Ahmed and Mr. Hassan. “Once the
investigation takes off, you will see that Dr.
Saraki was the instigator of this clear fraudulent
act.”
Given his skills as a political fighter, our legal
analyst said he expected Mr. Saraki to also file
an appeal should he lose at the tribunal. “The
only thing that will stop him is the threat of
criminal investigation. I don’t think he would
want to trigger a criminal investigation into the
conduct of Dr. (Mrs.) Ahmed and Alhaji Hassan,
which is certain to sweep him along. Section
124 (6) of the Electoral Act, 2010 (as amended)
is clear in this regard,” he said. According to
him, "the section stipulates that a candidate
shall be deemed to have committed an offence
if it was committed with his knowledge and
consent or the knowledge and consent of a
person who is acting under the general or
special authority of the candidate with
reference to the election."


www.saharareporters.com/2015/10/02/independent-national-electoral-commission-documents-may-doom-senate-president-sarakis.com

OluwaSeun, Lalasticlala come & collect news oo!
Keneking oooooooooo!

Always sahara reporters.

Gbese re o

This man should pls step down when the ovation is loud.

Yeparipa!!!OLE!!

He has dual citizenship
His wife was indicted by EFCC
He declared a false asset in 2007
Now, this?
Truly, Saraki giving them Tinubu sleepless night

Wake me up when he is in jail. For now, nobody should disturb me.

**snoring**

"nothing will happen to saraki, as long as PMB gave amaechi a 'saint' status, saraki is fit to rule th senate. We are solidly behind him, he's going nowhere till 2019 when he will take over from PMB as our next president".

Saraki! Saraki! Saraki!

Una wan kill saraki with hypertension .

The consequence of his actions is hunting him from all corners mehn

Fake source. You guys should check the validity of posts' sources sometimes.

Saraki should just go and hire Sahara Reporters as his Media aide, then his number 1 problem is solved.

Bukky in trouble...

Aww

Saraki can't escape unhurt.





When we are done with him, we will focus more on Dino melaye, that leprous bastard.

OZAOEKPE:
"nothing will happen to saraki, as long as PMB gave amaechi a 'saint' status, saraki is fit to rule th senate. We are solidly behind him, he's going nowhere till 2019 when he will take over from PMB as our next president".

Amaechi is a saint. Report me anywhere.