The Labour Party has rubbished the judgement of the Federal High Court in Kano State, which sacked Alex Otti, the governor-elect of Abia State, and all elected representatives of the Labour Party to the national assembly.
Speaking to Channels Television’s Politics Today programme on Friday, Kehinde Edun, the National Legal Adviser, reacting to a question on how the party felt about the judgement and what the party intends to do, said that the judgement was not only an aberration but was clearly the handiwork of the suspended deputy national chairman, Lamidi Apapa, and his executives.
“This judgement is a vindication of our position that the Apapa group is sponsored to bring the party down,” Edun said.
Read also: Kano court sacks Labour Party;s Alex Otti as Abia Governor
He explained that Apapa and some of his executives had planned this scheme of using illegality to cause mayhem in the party. They had, according to Edun, decided to take the matter outside the jurisdiction of the rightful court to file a case in the Kano State Federal High Court, which had no power to entertain such a matter.
He said, “They are the ones who went to Kano to file a matter thinking that they could injure the party by nullifying the elections of our elected candidates, including Alex Otti, our senators-elect, and our house reps-elect, but they couldn’t do it. The truth is that they went to Kano, they filed a matter against INEC and the Labour Party, and they think that with that judgement they could nullify the elections of our elected officials. It is not true, and that can never happen.”
On the steps that the party has taken, he said, “Yes, the judgement was given yesterday—we have a lawyer in Kano who is trying to get the judgement to us, and we will look at it. But ordinarily, none of our electoral officers was a defendant in that matter.’
He said that he found it difficult to accept such a judgement, especially as none of the defendants were present at the court, whose proceedings took precisely 48 hours to arrive at a judgement.
Edun also pointed out a contradiction in the judgement where, at the end, Justice M. N. Yunusa agreed that judgement should come from the appropriate court.
He said, “You can’t get judgement against somebody who has won an election, has gotten a certificate of return, and is due to be sworn in, and you are saying that you are getting judgement against that person.
“But I want to say that the court actually said that it would not give an order against Alex Otti because Otti and the elected members in Abia are not before the court. And that if anybody wants judgement against them, they should go to the appropriate division of the court. The court was talking about territorial jurisdiction in that matter. That court in Kano could not have done it.
“Just looking at that process, that judgement order, you could see that they were not in court. So there is no way we could suffer any injuries. We are happy because this is a vindication of our position about what Apapa and his mutiny group are doing.”
Meanwhile, Otti had called for calm in Abia State and promised that his inauguration would still go ahead, insisting that the judgement is illegal and therefore null and void.
