CLAIM: Tinubu suspends courts over fear of disqualification.
VERDICT: FALSE. The story source website isn’t identified with a name; it is hence untrustworthy. Moreover, no credible newspaper outlet has corroborated the story.
Full Text
A Facebook handle, Igbotimesmagazine, shared an article detailing the president, President Bola Tinubu, who has ordered the suspension of all courts in charge of the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal (PEPT) over fear of his disqualification.
“Presidential candidate Tinubu announces suspension of all courts in Nigeria, citing fear of disqualification,” the post headline read.
The article also mentioned that legal experts have argued for the constitutional legitimacy of the president’s actions, stating that it has “sparked widespread outrage and confusion among legal experts and the general public.”
President Tinubu emerged as the winner at the February 23 presidential election with 8,794,726 votes, ahead of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) candidate, Atiku Abubakar, who scored 6,984,520 votes and Labour Party (LP), Peter Obi, who got 6,101,533 votes.
However, both runners-up have expressed dissatisfaction with the electoral process and contested the verdict of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).
The tribunal, a five-member panel spearheaded by Haruna Tsammani, is yet to deliver judgement on both prayers of the disgruntled candidates.
Due to the sensitivity of the claim, and the rise in public interest regarding the 2023 presidential election, DUBAWA decided to verify the claim.
Verification
One of the red flags we noticed about the article is that it doesn’t have a name or brand identity, which is enough to question its source.
We checked credible newspaper outlets to see if they reported the same story but found none.
Significantly, news reports published by Premium Times reported that the court has yet to decide on Peter Obi’s petition and Atiku Abubakar’s against President Tinubu’s victory. It was reported that the court had reserved its judgement in the petitions brought to it by both petitioners, and both reports disclose “September” as the time when the court will hear the final addresses of both parties.
Suffice it to say that the acknowledged respondents of the petition are the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), President Bola Tinubu, Vice-president Kashim Shettima, and the All Progressives Congress (APC).
The same story has also been reported by Punch newspapers.
Meanwhile, we scrutinised the article and observed that in one part of the narrative, it commits a semantic error– one that has the potential to misinform the public.
It uses the phrase “upcoming election” for a process that has been conducted since February, which is rather unsettling for a professed news site.
We also did a keyword search, which suggests a “widespread outrage,” according to the article, towards President Tinubu’s Court suspension, but found none.
Finally, we reached out to the All Progressives Congress (APC) spokesperson, Felix Morka, who outrightly refuted the claim, calling it “arrant nonsense”.
Conclusion
The claim is false. There is no report by any credible news outlet that corroborates the story by this platform. The news website of the article isn’t credible and has been notorious for often sharing false and misleading reports around elections. The APC’s spokesperson has also debunked the news.
