President Muhammadu Buhari and the Attorney General of the Federation (AGF), Abubakar Malami (SAN), avoided a hearing on Friday in a suit seeking to prevent President-Elect Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s inauguration on May 29.
Despite being served with a hearing notice, Buhari and the AGF, the first and second respondents in the suit instituted by a former presidential candidate, Chief Ambrose Albert Owuro, refused to have any legal representation at the hearing of the suit at the Court of Appeal Abuja.
However, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), which conducted the 2019 presidential election, requested that the case be dismissed.
The third respondent, the electoral body, called Owuru’s claim frivolous, baseless, irritating, and unwarranted.
INEC, through its counsel, Hassan Halilu, criticized Owuru’s claims and urged the Court of Appeal to dismiss the suit with heavy costs on the grounds that it lacked merit.
President-elect Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who joined the case as an interested party at the Court of Appeal, argued that Owuru’s claims about the 2019 presidential election were not only strange, but also baseless, frivolous, and unmeritorious.
Tinubu told the three-man Court of Appeal panel, through his counsel, Adelani Ajibade of the Chamber of Chief Wole Olanipekun SAN, that the purported constitutional rights claimed and asserted by the former presidential candidate had been extinguished by a Supreme Court judgment that nullified his petition filed against the 2019 presidential election.