The Supreme Court has re-affirmed Dapo Abiodun as the duly elected Governor of Ogun State in the March 18th Governorship poll. The decision follows the earlier declaration by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), which declared Abiodun of the All Progressives Congress (APC) as the winner with 276,298 votes against his closest challenger, Oladipupo Adebutu of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), who scored 262,383 votes.
Dissatisfied with the election result, Adebutu and the PDP approached the tribunal seeking redress. However, the tribunal unanimously dismissed the petition, citing it as “incompetent, defective, disjunctive, and lacking merits.”
Undeterred, Adebutu appealed to the Court of Appeal in an attempt to reverse the tribunal’s decision. In a 2-1 decision, the Appellate Court upheld the tribunal’s decision, with the dissenting judgment highlighting that INEC should not have declared Abiodun the winner since the margin of lead was less than the number of cancelled votes.
The matter was subsequently taken to the Supreme Court, where Justice Tijjani Abubakar JSC upheld the concurrent findings of the lower courts. The Supreme Court ruled that the appellants, Adebutu and the PDP, could not discharge the burden of proof placed on them, thereby re-affirming Dapo Abiodun as the duly elected Governor of Ogun State.
