Politics
Meet The 5 Appeal Court Judges To Preside Peter Obi’s Case Against Tinubu, INEC

- The petitions challenging the 2023 presidential election will be determined by the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal, PEPT, Court sitting at the Court of Appeal in Abuja.
- The PEPT which is the court of first instance and has jurisdiction in presidential-election-related petitions will be manned by selected Court of Appeal judges.
Recall that the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Justice Olukayode Lateef Ariwoola had late last year inaugurated two hundred and seventy-seven election petitions tribunal judges to preside over matters relating to 2023 governorship, national and state assembly elections.
The presidential election petition tribunal judges are yet to be officially declared.
So far, there are five petitions against the presidential election which are from Peter Obi and the Labour party, Atiku Abubakar and Peoples Democratic Party, Action Alliance (AA) and its presidential candidate Mr Solomon Okangbuan Allied People’s Movement (APM) and its presidential candidate, Princess Chichi Ojei and Actions Peoples Party.

THE WHISTLER exclusively gathered from an official familiar with developments within the Court of Appeal and the National Judicial Council (of which the Court of Appeal president is a member), that the panel of judges that had already begun sitting on motions-exparte earlier filed by respective petitioners is most likely to be retained to continue presiding over the case when pre-hearing and full hearing sessions begin at the PEPT.
The panel of judges from the Court of Appeal who had presided over motions involving the 2023 presidential election and may be in the 2023 Presidential Election Petition Tribunal, PEPT panel are below:
JUSTICE HARUNA SIMON TSAMMANI
Tsammani (64) from Bauchi state was appointed to the Court of Appeal on 16th July 2010. He served as the Chairman of the three-man panel that granted Obi and Atiku’s motions to serve Tinubu their petitions by substituted means. He graduated from the Nigerian Law School, Lagos in 1983 and started out as High Court judge, in Bauchi state on 17th September 1998.
Tsammani has presided over various election and financial matters as a judge.
One of those cases is a petition filed by the former Governor of Oyo State, Abiola Ajimobi, challenging the judgment of the 2019 Election Petition Tribunal which had on November 19 same year upheld PDP’s Kola Balogun as the winner of the senatorial election for Oyo South held on February that year.
Balogun was said to have polled a total of 105,720 votes to defeat Ajimobi who garnered 92,218 votes but the latter disagreed and approached the Court of Appeal in Ibadan for redress.
Ajimobi based his petition on the allegation that his PDP counterpact was not qualified to represent his party at the election.
But Justice Haruna Tsammani who prepared the lead judgment dismissed Ajimobi’s petition for lacking in merit, holding that a person who was not part of a political party has no right to challenge the outcome of its primary election.
JUSTICE STEPHEN JONAH ADAH
Adah (66) served as a member of the three-man panel that granted Obi and Atiku’s motions to serve Tinubu their petitions by substituted means. He is from De-Kina LGA of Kogi State. He passed out from the Nigerian Law School in 1982 and became a Federal High Court judge on November 12, 1998 prior to his promotion to the Court of Appeal on November 5, 2012.
Adah has passed verdicts on several cases and one of his landmark decision was in the appeal filed by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission in 2020 against a trial court’s decision which partially upheld the no-case submission filed by former President Goodluck Jonathan’s cousin, Robert Azibaola.
The antigraft agency had instituted $40 million money laundering charges against him.
But Adah dismissed the appeal saying EFCC could not prove the allegation beyond reasonable doubt.
“The trial court was in order to discharge and acquit Azibaola and his company in counts 1,4,5,6,7,8 and 9 because offences of money laundering were not sufficiently proved, nor did the prosecution establish any prima facie case against the respondents.
“We have gone through the records and found that the appeal is lacking in merit, the appeal is hereby dismissed and the Judgment of the lower court upheld”, Mr Adah said.
JUSTICE ABBA BELLO MOHAMMED
Mohammed (62) from Kano State was part of the three-man panel that granted Obi and Atiku’s motions to serve Tinubu their petitions by substituted means.
He finished the Nigerian Law School in 1985 and was appointed as a judge of the High Court of the FCT in 2010. After serving for about 10 years, he was promoted to the Court of Appeal on the 28th of June 2021.
Justice Mohammed presided over the Nasarawa State Governorship Election Tribunal in 2019.
The PDP governorship candidate in the 2019 general election, Hon. David Emmanuel Ombugadu had sued INEC and Governor Abdulahi Sule of the All Progressive Congress (APC).
But Justice Mohammed dismissed the petition for lacking in merit , holding that the petitioner’s allegation of over-voting and electoral violence could not be substantiated.
JUSTICE JOSEPH IKYEGH
Justice Joseph Shagbaor Ikyegh(65) who hails from Benue State, led the PEPT panel that ordered the Independent National Electoral Commission to allow Atiku and Obi to inspect the electoral materials used during the presidential election.
He graduated from the Nigerian Law School, Lagos in 1980 and became a Judge of the High Court, Benue State on March 27, 1991 before his appointment as a Court of Appeal Justice on July 16th, 2010. Interestingly, Ikyegh was part of the 5-man panel that presided over the presidential election petitions in 2019 between Atiku and President Muhammadu Buhari.
The panel dismissed the Atiku’s case.
JUSTICE MONICA BOLNA’AN DONGBAN-MENSEM
The Court of Appeal president, Dongban-Mensem(66) finished at the Nigerian Law School, Lagos State in 1980. She was appointed judge of the FCT High Court in 1993 and ten years later, got into the Court of Appeal (25th June 2003).
She is an authority in Criminal and Civil Procedure Law, Legislative Drafting, Constitutional and Administrative Law among others.
One of the high-profile cases she presided over was that of the former chairman of the federal House of Representatives ad-hoc committee on fuel subsidy, Farouk Lawan.
Lawan was sentenced to seven years imprisonment on June 2021, by the FCT HIgh Court having found him guilty of bribery in 2012 following a three-count charge filed against him by the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC).
But he appealed to the Court of Appeal.
In its verdict in 2022, a three-member panel led by Appeal Court President, Monica Dongban-Mensem, said the ICPC did not prove its allegations in counts 1 and 2 which bordered on how Lawan allegedly demanded $3 million from business mogul Femi Otedola to remove his company from the list of defaulters in the fuel subsidy scam.
She added that the trial court’s decision on the two counts cannot stand.
By the judgment, Lawan’s jail term was reduced from seven to five years.
Source: The Whistler
News
2 BIRDS OF A FEATHER: HOW APC & PDP FEASTED ON LP VOTES
The 2023 Presidential Election has been themed the ‘worst election in the history of Nigeria’ by most Nigerians & observers from across the globe.

Prof Mahmood Yakubu declared Tinubu president-elect amidst controversial circumstances
Many weeks have passed since Prof Mahmood Yakubu controversially announced the APC candidate, Bola Ahmed Tinubu as the winner of the polls and subsequently returned as the president-elect, but Nigerians won’t let this slide as a resolve has been made by the country’s very youthful population to restore the mandate which majority of them opine is rightfully the LP presidential candidate, Peter Obi’s.
As the ruling party, it was only normal that APC was fingered as the ‘usual suspect’, their corrupt counterparts, PDP has however managed to stay out of the spotlight, leaving APC to face the wrath and backlash of angry Nigerians alone. However, Reportera News investigative reports has revealed that not only APC rigged in the 2023 presidential election, but their longtime opposition, PDP. Peter Obi’s LP who banked on INEC’s promise on delivering a free & fair poll were the victim of Prof Mahmood & INEC’s gross ineptitude.
Whilst APC focused their nefarious activities in remote areas in the North West and South West regions of the country, PDP focused on the South South and the North East, to ‘harvest’ LP votes, primarily. Studies have indicated that Peter Obi’s LP won Akwa-Ibom, Bayelsa, & Taraba; 3 PDP states, but were unfortunately rigged out of the polls, giving PDP controversial victories in the states. The electoral heist also saw the transfer of LP votes to APC in Benue, Plateau, and Rivers. Nigerians have called for the arrest and criminal prosecution of INEC chairman Prof Mahmood Yakubu for electoral, LP has also petitioned the judiciary seeking the annulment of the election by the Court of Appeal which is set to begin trial on 30th May 2023.
This is a developing Story, subscribe to our newsletter to read new episodes of our series; ‘2023 election Audit’.
News
Exposed: INEC Didn’t Have To Wipe BVA Data For ‘Storage Space’

INEC chairman, Prof Mahmood Yakubu
The 2023 presidential election may have come and gone to some people, it however left a bitter taste in the mouths of most Nigerians who came out in their numbers to vote for their future only for the election results to be systemically rigged in favour of the ruling party, APC. To many, this is a nightmare that they’re hoping they’d wake up from, but to INEC it’s a bone they can’t spit nor swallow; this is because the manner with which the election was rigged is what experts call ‘lazy rigging’ due to the fact that they left far too many loopholes, subsequently leaving a trail of evidence to the public of the travesty disguised as election that occured on February 25th 2023.
This has left INEC in between crossroads as they are torn in the middle of defending the poorly conducted heist or admitting that the poll was flawed. The electoral body has however refused to lean towards the latter, arguing vehemently that they conducted a free & fair election, this obviously is a blatant lie based on the response of Nigerians who mostly feel that the results were rigged.
INEC has been dragged to court by the two main opposition parties, LP and PDP, however it is only the former who actually has a strong grip on their case since evidence has also shown that the latter committed the same electoral fraud that they accuse the ruling party, APC of.

Ekemp M8, the BVA used by INEC
BVA ‘Wahala’
One of the first requests of LP to the court was to have them inspect the BVAs to ensure that the INEC-published-results corresponded with the data available on the devices. However, INEC made a bogus claim that they had to wipe the presidential election results data to make storage space for the gubernatorial polls which happened almost a month after the presidential polls.
The Labour Party led by it’s presidential candidate, Peter Obi which on account of most Nigerians won the election are the major victims of this fraud have approached the courts to retrieve their stolen mandate, one which is expected to upheaval the status quo; in fact, many analysts have postulated that this trial is the biggest in the history of this nation.
In this article, Reportera News takes a deeper look at the device in question to determine if INEC’s claim could be substantiated and most importantly, proven to be truthful. Unfortunately, it isn’t; INEC lied inconspicuously and as a matter of fact, our investigation revealed that the device could handle upto 50 more elections of the same magnitude without needing to erase the data.
Discoveries:
The model of the BVA devices used by INEC is an ‘Ekemp M8’, it’s a biometric tablet with a processor speed of 1.3GHz manufactured by the global electronic powerhouse, Samsung. It comes with a 2 Gigabyte storage space with options that goes upto 8 Gigabytes. The simply interpretation of this information is that the device can accommodate data for 50 different elections without needing a ‘reconfiguration’. This ultimately begs the questions;
what is INEC hiding?
Why are they scared to hand over the BVAs for inspection of it’s content if they affirm that the election was conducted in a free and fair atmosphere?
The answer is simple; there is no correlation between the fraudulently announced results and the results in the BVAs, they just do not match, hence their decision to withhold the device and avert exposing the electoral fraud they committed.

Specs of the Ekemp M8
our IT experts looked at the specifications of this device and have come to a technical conclusion that it was ‘illogical’ to wipe the data since the election would have taken at most 2% of the storage capacity using the average Polling Unit to voters ratio which is 300 voters per polling unit.

According to most Nigerians and available evidence, Peter Obi of LP won the 2023 presidential election
As Nigerians stay focused on the judiciary hoping that the INEC results are annulled unequivocally, INEC and APC have deployed many machineries to consolidate the fraud they did, one of which was Lai Mohammed’s Washington DC trip where he went on international media organization at the behest of his paymasters to spread false information on the election, an action that has received heavy criticism from Nigerians who think that it was a waste of public funds as the announcement could have been made here in Nigeria, albeit faux news.
Verdict:
Our verdict is very clear, there is absolutely no reason for INEC to erase, transfer, or reconfigure the data on the BVA since there was more than enough storage space and most importantly, the BVAs were the subject of investigation for electoral fraud, hence not meant to be tampered with as this could affect the outcome of the case.
News
Rivers: Nyesom Wike And Sim Fubara, Rivers State Governor-elect Fight Dirty

L-R Sim Fubara, Nyesom Wike
A head of May 29, 2023 inauguration, the outgoing governor of Rivers State, Nyesom Wike and his ‘political son’, and current Governor-elect of the state, Sim Fubara have fallen out, Reportera News has learned.
According to reports from Rivers State, the rift is as a result of disagreement between the duo on the Party’s (People’s Democratic Party) presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar.
According to reports from Rivers State, the rift is as a result of disagreement between the duo on the Party’s (People’s Democratic Party) presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar.

Nyesom Wike political godfather of Sim Fubara
A source told Reportera in Port Harcourt that Wike is fuming that Fubara invited Atiku and other PDP leaders considered to be his enemies to the May 29 inauguration at Portharcourt without his consent. The source said that when confronted, Fubara told his close aides that he wouldn’t want to inherit the enemies of the outgoing governor and wouldn’t want to start fighting political wars early in his administration.
He opted for reconciliation with the party leaders both at the state and national, which didn’t go down well with the Port Harcourt hit man. This has created a huge crack between the two and we were told that Wike is withholding release of funds for the inauguration. The political battle between Wike and Fubara will be interesting.
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