A Lot Of Candidates Will Waste More Of Their Money In Court – Baba-Ahmed

The spokesperson for the Northern Elders Forum, Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, has said a lot of the presidential candidates who lost in the February 25 election are going to waste more of their money in court.

Bab-Ahmed stated this while reacting to the petitions filed by some candidates at the Presidential Election Petitions Tribunal sitting in Abuja.

Naija News reports that the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku Abubakar, and his Labour Party (LP), Peter Obi, had approached the tribunal to seek the nullification of the declaration of Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) as the winner of the February 25 election

Also, the presidential candidates of the (Action Alliance), Solomon Okangbuan, and his Allied Peoples Movement (APM) counterpart, Princess Chichi Ojei, have sought the nullification of Tinubu’s victory.

In a chat with The PUNCH, Baba-Ahmed said a lot of the flagbearers are just going to waste more of their money at the tribunal and other levels of courts.

He stated that many of the candidates know they have lost fair and square but it has become a Nigerian tradition that almost every politician who loses an election must go to court.

He said: “I think a lot of politicians are just going to waste more of their money. There are many of them who know they have lost fair and square but it has become a Nigerian tradition that almost every politician who loses an election must go to court.

“Another thing is that we are creating a kind of situation that will increase corruption in the judiciary and it is putting an unfair burden on them, they shouldn’t be in a position where they will have to decide 60 or 70 percent of who should be our next set of leaders.

“I know that the judiciary has the mandate to adjudicate in cases arising from the electoral process, but for goodness sake, the judiciary is made up of Nigerians and people now take all their weak and corrupted values to these judges and want them to decide who is right or wrong.

“The kind of democracy we are running requires very critical scrutiny. Is it working for us? Do we have the right attitude? Sociologists will find a serious task handling our value system and how it affects our democratic process. If we have to continue operating the democratic process, we need to get very serious about fixing it otherwise one day we will have an election that will put an end to this country.”