One of the two Supreme Court Justices who gave contrary verdict on the Osun Gubernatorial Election on Friday, Justice Kumai Akaas has accused the Independent National Electoral Commission of rigging the polls.
Justices Kumai Akaas and Paul Galinje, disagreed with the ruling of the other five Justices that affirmed Gov Oyetola’s victory.
Justice Akaas accused INEC of rigging the polls during the rerun, while Justice Galinje argued that the courts should have given attention to the controversy over the rerun polls.
Justice Akaas said INEC had no cogent reason to have conducted a rerun in the first place.
“INEC is supposed to be an umpire not a partisan group. For INEC to have pronounced the election inconclusive showed that it had something up its sleaves. And it achieved that through the rerun,” said Akaas.
The blistering rebuke of the electoral body came at the Supreme Court’s ruling on the election dispute brought by Ademola Adeleke of the Peoples Democratic Party.
The two judges from a seven-member panel, disagreed with a majority ruling upholding the September 2018 election in Oyetola’s favour.
The tribunal also said that the PDP would still have won the poll even if it had opted to validate the supplementary election.