Election tribunal: Admission of EU report, much ado over nothing – Keyamo

The former Labour Minister of State, Festus Keyamo, has taken the sail off the excitement that greeted the admittance of the European Election Observation Mission (EU EOM) report on the last presidential and states elections in Nigeria.

Recall that in its final submission, the EU report claimed that the last election through which President Bola Tinubu was elected is flawed.

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This has generated fresh controversy in the country over the already disputed result.

Although, the losing parties, Peoples Democratic Party and Labour Party, are already at the election tribunal sitting in Abuja seeking to declare the administration of Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress as invalid, the admittance of the report by the tribunal has yet kicked up another dust.

But according to Keyamo, the report has nothing for the opposition to be excited about as the tribunal may eventually throw it out as a piece of worthless paper.

“Can someone please calmly and kindly explain to those who know nothing about legal processes and are getting over-excited over nothing that:

“1. Admission of a document by a court of law is not necessarily an acceptance of its contents as no weight may be attached to the document at the end of the day;

“2. That there was an agreement between all counsel to let all documents be admitted in evidence (even when there are objections) pending when arguments as to the objections regarding admissibility would be taken at the stage of address before final judgment.

“3. Hence, documents admitted during proceedings can be expunged at the stage of judgment if they are found to have been inadmissible in the first place.

“It is important to give these clarifications so that legal illiterates will not suffer heart attacks if they find out that the so-called documents upon which they are pinning all their hopes are jettisoned at the end of the day for lack of probative value or for being inadmissible. I am not saying this will be the case. I am only saying that it is a POSSIBILITY in law. Nothing is ‘slam dunk’ because a document is ‘admitted’ at this stage.

“I rest my case,” he wrote.

Freelanews also reports that the presidency rejected the unfavourable report, saying it had many reasons to believe the “jaundiced report”, based on the views of fewer than 50 observers “was to merely sustain the same premature denunciatory stance contained in EU’s preliminary report released in March.”

Rtn. Victor Ojelabi

Ojelabi, the publisher of Freelanews, is an award winning and professionally trained mass communicator, who writes ruthlessly about pop culture, religion, politics and entertainment.