Counsel of President Bola Tinubu in the case the Labour Party’s Peter Obi brought against him have told the tribunal that his non securing 25 per cent of votes cast in Abuja cannot stop him from being President.
They said the Federal Capital Territory voters have no special status over others across the countries.
One of Tinubu’s lawyers, Chief Wole Olanipekun, was quoted as noting:
“May we draw the attention of the court to the fact that there is no punctuation (comma) in the entire section 134(2)(b) of the Constitution, particularly, immediately after the ‘States’ and the succeeding ‘and’ connecting the Federal Capital Territory with the States. In essence, the reading of the subsection has to be conjunctive and not disjunctive, as the Constitution clearly makes it so. Pressed further, by this constitutional imperative, the FCT is taken ‘as if’ it is the 37th State, under and by virtue of section 299 of the Constitution.”
