The Supreme Court has rejected an application by the All Progressives Congress asking it to review its last judgment in which it voided the party’s participation in the last elections in Zamfara State.
A five-man panel of the court, led by Justice Olabode Rhodes-Vivour, in a ruling on Monday morning, struck out the application, argued by senior lawyer Robert Clarke (SAN).
In an unprecedented judicial pronouncement last May, the Supreme Court awarded governorship, National Assembly and state Assembly elective posts to the Peoples Democratic Party(PDP), by nullifying the participation of the candidates of the ruling All Progressives Congress in the 2019 General Elections.
It then declared the party with the second highest votes as winners of the elections, making the PDP candidates beneficiaries by default.
The APC members had been locked in judicial dispute over the legality of the primaries conducted.
Since the verdict, the APC had nursed hopes that its members could salvage something from the electoral ruins. On June 24, the state chairman, Alhaji Lawali Liman said the branch was trying to ensure that candidates who were selected unopposed were removed from Supreme Court list.
“We held a meeting recently with the party’s National Chairman in Abuja who informed me that our party has a window to challenge the action of the INEC following the Supreme Court ruling that nullified our election in the state.
“Since the matter taken to the court centred on irregularities of primaries, we had 13 candidates for the state House of Assembly, three for the Senate and two for the House of Representatives”
“These were those who contested unopposed and the primaries did not affect them.
“INEC was too hasty to declare the party with the second highest votes because the exact directive of the Supreme Court was that the next party with the ‘requisite spread should be declared and by these, our issues were not taken into consideration,” Liman said.
