 The Presidential Election Petition Court PEPC on Monday held its inaugural session, a legal to retroll that precedes the actual hearing of petitions seeking to nullify the outcome of the 2023 presidential election. Now at the session, a five-member panel of justices of the Court of Appeal that will hear and determine all the five petitions challenging the declaration of Bola Tinubu of the ruling of Progressive Congress APC as the winner of the presidential election were revealed. Whereas the panel will be headed by the presiding justices of the Abuja Division of the Court of Appeal, justices Haruna, Samani, and other members of the panel are justices Tivan Adda, Sabah Division, justices Mansurat Bollaji-Yusuf, Sabah Division, justices Bolu Kuromo Ugo, Kanu Division, as well as justices Abba Mohamed of the Badon Division. Now in his opening remarks, the President, the presiding justices, urged lawyers representing all petitioners to avoid sensational comments stressing that the Court would not tolerate time-wasting tactics and technicalities. Well, joining us to discuss the said technicalities is Barista Obinna Chikwiz, a legal practitioner. Good evening, Barista Obinna. Thank you so much for joining us. Good evening, Meryem. Great. Thank you for having me. Yes. Explain to the layman what you mean, what the Court or the panel meant by technicalities. Of course, we know about the sensational statements, but what are the technicalities that they would not be considering in this particular proceedings? Okay. I mean, technicality referred to by the justices of the presidential election tribunal. What that simply means is that the Court will not base its judgment or will not allow for kind of reliance on misstep or reliance or failure to follow a particular procedure prescribed by law. So what the Court is saying is that the Court will hear the matter based on its merit, based on its merit, that the Court will not allow for filing of applications in court, maybe owing to or due to failure on either of the parties to have followed a particular procedure prescribed by law. What you find in the normal court proceedings is that if the other party fails to file a particular thing or follow a particular procedure, the lawyer on the other side will either file a preliminary objection or, within the issue of jurisdiction that the Court does not have jurisdiction based on that failure, but in this instance, the tribunal has said that all that the tribunal wants to do or will do will be to hear the petition, the presidential election petition based on its merit. I think that is a welcome development. It goes to show that the tribunal, this time around, is ready to deal with the main issue here, the matter based on its merit. You've seen tribunals like this also in previous elections who have also made statements like this of looking at the cases based on merit. But again, looking at the time that we're in, Nigerians have some post-traumatic stress syndrome from the elections and previous elections that we've had. What do you think will be a game changer or what do you think this tribunal has that would one way or the other assure the average Nigerian that there's going to be some level of trust for the judiciary also knowing that there's a trust deficit between Nigerians and the judiciary? I think going from the few statements made by the Court, I think the Court is doing a right direction. But again, Nigerians are kind of the background of previous decisions of the tribunal and because with the Nigerians themselves didn't go down or didn't come, didn't resonate with what they're thinking of Nigerians. I think looking at the few statements that have been made, I think the tribunal is doing the right direction. But for me personally, the only one that I did not like or I will not support or of course my support will not change anything. But the only one I didn't like is the decision of the Court not to allow the proceedings to be aired live on television. I was actually about to ask that because many Nigerians were hopeful that they would bring some form of leveller with that access into the Court room even though that's not generally been our proceeding or the modus operandi. Many had thought that at least for once this would be the case. Why do you think that maybe the Court decided or the tribunal decided to take this position? Okay. I think that the Court decided to take this position maybe because of the tension in the country. If the Court decides to allow for live viewing of the proceedings, there is a likelihood that people, Nigerians may interpret or may see a particular incident or incident that will occur during trial or during the proceedings to end being biased. I think the Court wants to be free to either correct or do the right thing. That's what the Court wants to do. But to me as a person, I would have thought and my thought and belief is and would have been that considering the way things are in the country, it would be nice to allow the presidential election tribunal to be as like. Let's talk about the role of INEC in all of this because many of these petitions are against INEC. And you and I were here during the elections with the issues with the upload of results and some of the behavior of INEC officials and some things that happened in different areas across the country. INEC, of course, through its lawyer had during that session said that they had confidence that they will be able to work in consonants with the tribunal to bring justice to all the petitions that are before it. But again, do you see INEC being as plain as possible being that there's also been allegations that some of the results that have been uploaded to INEC's portal is not the same as the results that were gotten at the polling units. These are some of the issues that will be raised. What is the sincerity level that you presume INEC will bring to this particular hearing? Okay. I think the everything or anything that has to do with uploading of results from IRS and the intricacies of the election, it will not be like this because it's already before the court. It is one of the things that the court will decide. It will be the position of the court to decide whether or not the results that have been uploaded to IRS should be the concerns which should be allowed from part of the election. But all I will tell you is, let's wait and see. Finally, there's never been a precedence in this country where a tribunal unsat a presidential candidate for no reason or for any reason to talk of. So what should we be expecting? I was saying that we should pre-empt of course the tribunal, but looking at the antecedents of all these tribunals that we've had in election tribunals, should we be hoping upon a star or is it going to be business as usual? I think a good beginning to a story, a good beginning to a story, let's also hope and see. I want to believe and I am very sure that this, the just judiciary will come. Every Nigerian, every Nigerian brought up. Let's hope, let's hope that the judiciary will come to light. And the people who have preceded and preceded them have shown that tribunals or tribunals have never decided to or have come to a death. But like I said, a good beginning, let's also hope and see. We are confident that the judiciary will come to light. We apologize for that break, but this is where we say our goodbyes. Apologies to our guests. Boris Albina is a legal practitioner and he was speaking to us live from Lagos. My name is Mary Annakul and that's the show tonight. Thank you for watching. See you tomorrow.