Nigeria’s electoral umpire, the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, has said it will implement the order of the Federal High Court restraining the commission from listing candidates of the All Progressives Congress for the general elections in Rivers State.
Recall that Justice JK Omotosho of the Federal High Court sitting in Port Harcourt, on Monday, issued a restraining order on INEC not to recognise any candidate of the APC for the general elections in Rivers State.
This, the court said, was as a result of the party failing to obey the order of a state high court presided by Justice Chiwendu Nwogu restraining the party from conducting congresses.
The judge who lampooned the APC in the landmark judgement said that the party has also failed to vacate the order of the state high court.
However, the National Electoral Commissioner in charge of Operations, Festus Okoye in an interview explained that that the commission will not hesitate to delist the names of the candidates of the party after taking a critical look at the judgment, Daily post reports.
Okoye also said INEC was not concerned about the different interpretations of the judgement, adding that the commission has a team that will study the judgement and advice on the line of action.
According to him, “We are not interested in the conundrum in Rivers State. What we have said is that the moment any properly constituted court of law makes an order or gives a judgement and we obtain a certified true copy of that particular judgement and we confirm that it is a judgement from a properly constituted court of Law and that the judgement affects any of our processes we will give effect to that particular judgement. This applies across board.
“There is what we call the ratio of a matter. Why we insist on obtaining court judgments and studying it before giving effect to them is because we do not want to rely on the reportage on the pages of newspapers or posts on social media.
“We want to know the ratio and the obiter in the matter before the court and what were the orders of the court as it relates to the matter before it.”
