Gatekeepers News<\/a> reports that the tribunal sitting in Yola, the Adamawa State capital on Monday and chaired by Theodorer Uloho, deemed the petition \u201cincompetent, defective, incongruous, and not properly instituted\u201d and dismissed it.<\/span><\/p>\nArdo of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), who challenged the outcome of the March 18 election and the April 18 declaration of Fintiri as the winner following the April 16 supplementary election.<\/span><\/p>\nArdo\u2019s petition instituted on May 8, joined the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Fintiri and 16 others as respondents, alleged that the election was not conducted in substantial compliance with the Electoral Act and that it was marred by corrupt practices (bribery), threats and violence and however sought the nullification of the entire exercise.<\/span><\/p>\nOn their part, the 1st to 4th respondents told the tribunal that the petition was statute-barred and could not be entertained by the tribunal, alleging that the petition was not supported with evidence nor filed in compliance with the provision of the Electoral Act.<\/span><\/p>\nIn her judgement, the Chairperson of the tribunal, Theodorer Uloho, dismissed the petition as \u201cincompetent, defective, incongruous and not properly instituted before the tribunal.\u201d She also held that the petitioners were not certain about what they wanted.<\/span><\/p>\nShe further held that the allegation of corrupt practices must be proven with cogent and credible evidence and that failure to do so rendered the petition worthless, lifeless and without any probative value.<\/span><\/p>\nShe dismissed the petition and awarded the sum of N200,000 in favour of the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th respondents.<\/span><\/p>\nReacting to the judgement, Adamawa State deputy governor, Prof. Kaletapwa Farauta declared it as a \u201cvictory for Adamawa State\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\nShe however extended an olive branch to the party that lost out to join hands with the Fintiri\u2019s administration to move the state forward.<\/span><\/p>\nOn his part, the counsel for the petitioner, Sylvester Emanube, faulted parts of the judgement, saying, \u201cThere are many decisions that were made excellent, there are some that we think we have to look at again; particularly the ones that the Court of Appeal had made decisions on, which were also decided today.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Governorship Election Petition Tribunal in Adamawa State has dismissed the petition filed by Dr. Umar Ardo of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), and upheld the election of Governor Ahmadu Umaru Fintiri.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15802,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[7738,7739,2329,110,1079],"class_list":["post-15801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-adamawa-governor","tag-ahmadu-umaru-fintiri","tag-election-tribunal","tag-pdp","tag-sdp"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theblogonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15801"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theblogonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theblogonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theblogonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theblogonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15801"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/theblogonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15801\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15803,"href":"https:\/\/theblogonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15801\/revisions\/15803"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theblogonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theblogonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theblogonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theblogonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}