Legal luminary and Chairman of the Presidential Advisory Committee Against Corruption (PACAC), Prof. Itse Sagay SAN, has advised Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) presidential candidate, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar not to further humiliate himself by going to court to contest the outcome of Saturday’s presidential election.
Sagay made this known while reacting to President Muhammadu Buhari’s re-election on Wednesday.
According to him, the presidential election complied substantially with local and international electoral standards, which he said was attested to by election observers deployed to observe the process.
Sagay said, “My advice to Atiku is that it’s not advisable for him to go to court for political and moral reasons.
“He should be mature politically and accept defeat with dignity.
“By rejecting the result, what he is doing is to drag himself on the ground and lose all the little dignity that he has left. At the end of the day, he will be a double loser.
“On the legal side, you can only upset a declaration of victory of an election if you can establish that the process of the election did not comply substantially with the rules of the election.
“So, if there is failure to comply in some areas, it has no effect on the validity of the election. It has to be substantial.
“There is no way anybody can say that this election does not comply substantially in electoral rules. All the various observers and monitors have written their reports and they have said it was a well organised election with hitches here and there.
“What this means is that they are saying it substantially complies with the rules. So, legally, Atiku will fail, morally he will fail, and so, it’s not just good for him.
“Today, the only claim to fame that Jonathan has was in accepting defeat and phoning President Buhari.
“After we have blamed him for his misgovernance and all the poor things he did, then we remember that aspect and then we respect him and the world also respects him for it.
“So, I think.”
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