 Protesting Kanu state as residents and NNPP supporters reject tribunal judgment which sacked Governor Yusuf Abba and Lagos election petition tribunal dismisses Jandor and Rhodes Viva's case confirms someone who's victory. This is plus politics and I am Mary Anna Cohn. Some residents of Kanu state took to the streets to protest against the judgment of the election petition tribunal which sacked Governor Yusuf Abba as winner of the 2023 gubernatorial poll in the state. The Kanu state governorship election petitions tribunal sacked Abba and further withdrew the certificate of return presented to him by the independent National Electoral Commission and declared the all-progressive Congress APC candidate Nester Gowat-Gawuna winner of the March 18 governorship polls. As a result, some residents have gone to the streets protesting the verdict by the election petition tribunal. Joining us live in the studio to discuss this is Sanusi Bature. He's the Chief Press Secretary to the governor of Kanu state and also joining us is Ladikwa Johnson who is acting national spokesperson for the New Nigeria People's Party NNPP. Thank you so much gentlemen for joining us. Good evening. Let me start with you Mr. Bature. Let's look at the case and the judgment. Many people would say that they did not see this coming knowing what they know. Because of the Kwan Kwan Sia movement some people would say that they they thought that you know you had a sealed case but there are also people who say you should have seen it coming. Well the reality of the matter is that winning election is not a day job and there are some factors that contributes to winning election. Part of which in Kanu is the grassroot mobilization of the Kwan Kwan Sia movement under the platform of NNPP which brought its excellency Elijah Abakabiri Yusuf into power on the March 18th Gobernatorial elections. In the first place the party has been into the limelight after Senator Abhimusa Konkoso exited the PDP and they come to the NNPP in March 2022 and it has been an operation of one year and he made the party very very popular and particularly in Kanu we were able from zero to somewhere because we don't have a councillor we don't have a local government chairman but we were able to get 18 House of Representatives out of 24. We are also able to get two out of three senators in the first election and we're able to have the highest votes of the presidential election to conquer so in Kanu at that time close to a million votes leading both Tinibu and Atiku and for the second election in March 18 which is the Gobernatorial we have 40 set House of Assembly so NNPP got 26 out of the 40 while APC is having 14 PDP have none and for the Gobernation election we won with a white margin of over 126 votes and Abakabiri Yusuf is the only governor in Nigeria during the 2023 election to win election with over a million votes so he is the governor with the highest vote in Nigeria so therefore we have never expected that there will be a time because some people feel intimidated by the NNPP and some people have been intimidated by what he started within the first hundred days in office they feel like Kanu is too important to be left in the hands of the opposition so therefore what happened at the tribunal is an unfair judgment lopsided and we're going to challenge it at the appeal court we're very we're pretty sure that the appeal court and the supreme court will uptown this judgment because the yearnings of the people of Kanu said need to be represented and there have been clear evidences that there's no reason to cancel the 165 votes from the over a million votes that the NNPP got at the Gobernatorial election if you mention the issue the reason the court said first of all one of the grounds for for this petition is that APC is challenging the status of his Excellency Abakabiri Yusuf as a member of the NNPP and by law this is a pre-election matter and even at the pre-election matter APC as an opposition party does not have the ground to challenge us that can be challenged by only a member of NNPP who contested who probably contested election along with the priorities exactly but in our case his Excellency contested on a post because there was a consensus and he imagined victorious at the consensus and what we did was a permission we did a permission in June 2022 at San Abacha Youth Center and then he was affirmed by all the delegates including the parties stakeholders at the state level so therefore there's no contention about that but APC came to challenge that status and the court at the preliminary level said it doesn't have jurisdiction to take care of such issue but on the other way around they still say if they have the ground they will declare him not a member of the NNPP that's aside because it doesn't really affect the status of the judgment but the other issue that affected the status of the judgment is the issue of removing of 165,000 boat from our boat which is over 1 million boats so even at that APC claimed that there are some unstamped ballot papers there are those that are not signed by the presiding officers and those that are not dated so the electoral act as amended 2022 as amended clearly spelt out the reason for accepting an unstamped ballot paper because section 63 subsection 2 of the electoral act clearly said that as far as unstamped ballot paper or dated or undated or unsigned ballot paper is concerned as long as the presiding officer is able to justify that that ballot paper is from the ballots the ballots bunch supplied by INEC which is the electoral empire so therefore that shall be counted it shall be counted so where are the agents of the APC at that time that they couldn't challenge that unsigned ballot paper at the polling station and then APC said in their petition that they are going to provide thousands of witnesses to testify before the court on some of the evidences presented before it but they were able to present only 32 witnesses and even those 32 witnesses at the level of cross examination our lawyers were able to challenge them and were able to make them do now some of their deposition of our evidence is interesting Mr Johnson let me bring you in here still talking facts of the case he's told us most of it legally especially if you are defending a case such as this in making sure that you prove these votes and the cancellation the burden is on the APC I guess in this case to provide all the witnesses from all the polling units was this done no it wasn't the petition itself by the APC was a petition based on overvoting violence etc and of course the ballots that were presumably not stamped or what have you for you to prove the Niger the Nigerian law has established that each polling unit is independent you have to show what happened and that polling unit and it must be done by someone presumably an agent or someone that was there at the polling unit now you challenged over a thousand polling units and you only brought 32 people to court so automatically you know that they have there is no way they could have proven widespread violence or what have you but then the panel did what it did it decided in its own wisdom but another thing that is worrisome is the facts that people have said people of the tribunal legal practitioners of the tribunal have said that these ballots came in or the so-called unsigned ballots were attended from the bar not from a witness in the witness book box and so the NMPP had no opportunity to cross-examine meaning that they had no fair hearing regarding that aspect of it so normally they had normally your party parties attorney is supposed to see this particular evidence and it should not be tended by a lawyer it should be from a witness yes ordinarily such a thing would be tended by a witness most logically it ought to have come from the person in whose custody it was which was I neck that would be the natural thing I like was joined in this petition it was a dependent as well okay so you would have expected the I neck officer to tender we've had 165,000 so so so ballots that we haven't there wasn't stamped or whatever we would have been able to say okay based on section 83 and the 63 to would have then been able to ask them that okay you had them why did your presiding office account did it come out of the pad of ballot papers etc etc etc that way you'd have had a more holistic thing about those ballots can I ask I've covered elections so I probably have a fair knowledge of how these things work before those ballot papers are given out the I neck official shows them to the agents right and and these agents have to either agree or disagree before you know the process begins do you know if this was done it was done most likely it was done and even when it's been sorted the agents are there when you empty the box when you sort the ballots they're there they look at it then you start taking one and MPP one APC one PDP they're there they didn't object so all of a sudden you now come up with this point that is why a lot of people law professors different people if you read the opinion pages and newspapers all up in arms about this judgment it really makes no sense to a lot of us are you implying that this judge is where they swung this judgment in favor of the APC are you implying that the bench is biased well not necessarily I am saying that they have brought about a miscarriage of justice either by not avert in their minds to 63 to or by just negligence on the other hand many are implying not like the poor Johnson many are implying that with the surrounding facts the optics we have etc. that they are not comfortable with how they arrived at their decision you understand I will not say that they swung it's for the APC or for any side based on bias but one issue you will recall if you've read it that one of the judges went on to cast aspersions in source at members of the NMPP calling us bandits terrorists and calling us a cult now with that I can make both to say that oh that man was prejudiced interesting let's put a pin then let me come back to you mr. Bature let's talk about the government now many people are worried that with this you know happening it might be a distraction from governance it might not allow the governor to you know continue with what he's done in that same and breath I want to ask it's 100 plus days for your governor in office even though this verdict has been given what can the use of administration say they've done in a few days that it's been in office well the hundred days have been a very successful days of the administration of the engineer abacabir Yusuf why I say this is because of the laudable projects and achievement my son achievement he was able to record the judgment did not in any way distract him because even a day after the judgment he held the state weekly executive council meeting where he approves a lot of projects and he continued to do whatever necessary to ensure that cano is under a serious administration so within the hundred days let me give an example of what he achieved in education because education has been his priority number one number two and number three so you remember the issue and I have seen it in the news here in Lagos that there is a fear a lot of students will drop out from the university because of the hike in the tuition fees so in canoes the story is different because his excellency has directed that the ministry of higher education should pay for 100% tuition fee for 7,000 students of canoes indians studying at Bayer University which is the only federal university in the state and for over 10 state-owned tertiary institutions within the state which include two state-owned universities his excellency directed that instead of increasing like what other states are doing he said the current tuition fee before the first subsidy removal should also be reduced to 50% so some people that are studying NCE diploma you see them paying less than 10,000 naira per session and some in the university you see them paying just 10,000 plus per session so it's very easy in canoes and apart from that he also reintroduced the foreign scholarship program which was started by senator Abiyo Musa Konkosu by October 1001 first-class holders will defer to Nigeria to 14 different countries to study master's degree in different fields and also he has settled 1.6 billion naira which is the payment for the payment of senior secondary school examination NECA in particular for the previous and this year's candidates so he has settled that few few months ago and then he ordered the opening of the 26th Institute of for skill accusation because we're suffering from unemployment and for you to get us out of that unemployment thing you need to provide the youth with the skills so there were 26 institutions that are mainly designed to provide on the job training, fishery, animal feats, agribusiness mechanization, film industry, development journalism, entrepreneurship, a lot of pills so those institutes were closed by Ganduja administration and they have not operate in the last eight years. On assumption, it's excellency director that all of them should be reopened and admissions to start immediately so that people will be enrolled would be trained and startup capital will be given to them to be doing business in different areas. Part of those 26 institutions there's a reformatory institute which take care of the drug artists because you know if you look at the indices. I was going to ask about you know what the government is doing that regard because there's been not just in Kanu but then across look I think I've asked you that question before about the drug. You know the indices for drug abuse does not favor Kanu in any way the last 10 years I can see because a lot of youths, male and female have engaged themselves into the issue of drug abuse so it's excellency startup attacks post and the hero opened the reformatory institute so they would be reformed trained and they will be given a job depending on or some would be taken to school if they have the required qualification they would be taken to university or polytechnic or colleges of education and some of them will be given startup capital to start any business of their choice so that they can be proud of themselves and their families can be proud of them and then as a professional in the water industry Kanu especially the metropolitan area has suffered a lot in terms of the scarcity of portable water. So within the 100 days most of the metropolitan area are now being supplied with a portable water almost everywhere because he has repaired most of the water treatment plants and he appointed all the necessary MDAs under the Ministry of Water Resources and those are expert you know that is his own area is an expert in water resources and yes so it's an area that he has so much interest so we were able to achieve a lot in the issue and now he's going into the rehabilitation of dams so that we can have the available water for irrigation so that the state will be will maintain its status in having the all year round production of agriculture. Let me break come back to the politics of this whole case it was reported that one of your commission threatened the judge although we hear that your governor has you know let him go but then many would ask why what gave this commissioner the temerity to speak on behalf of your administration because I mean he may not have been speaking on behalf of the governor but then he's a representative. First of all I want people to understand that my governor my principal is a non-nonsense man and that commissioner does not represent the governor it's not commissioner for information and it's not spokesperson to the governor in any way it's a commissioner for land and physical planning. Somewhere somehow he got interviewed by some social media activists and he made that statement and the governor as a chief security of the state cannot in any way condone such unguided utterances so therefore he immediately fired the commissioner so that because we believe an official to that caliber should not be seen making such utterances because it relates to the security peace and security of the state so therefore the governor need to be appreciated for taking a proactive major immediately because few hours after the statement his excellency has issued a statement saying that he relieved the commissioner out of his appointment immediately. Finally Mr Johnson before we go because we're out of time how long before we see the NMPB back in court to you know challenge this decision and the verdict? I believe that the notice of appeal must have been filed by now so once that is done the appeal entered then briefs of appeal will be asked for we will file a written brief appellant's brief and the respondents will file the respondents brief and I believe that if there are no interim matters to be sorted out that the appeal will be heard. Okay well we'll look forward to that. Samusibature is the chief press secretary to the governor of Kainu state and Ladic for Johnson is the acting national spokesperson for the new Nigeria People's Party. Thank you so much gentlemen for being here. Thank you madam. All right we'll take a break when we come back we will be looking at the verdict from the Lagos state tribunal. Stay with us.