{"id":38505,"date":"2024-07-11T15:51:08","date_gmt":"2024-07-11T15:51:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/?p=38505"},"modified":"2024-07-11T15:51:08","modified_gmt":"2024-07-11T15:51:08","slug":"court-of-appeal-affirms-usman-ododos-election-as-kogi-state-governor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/2024\/07\/11\/court-of-appeal-affirms-usman-ododos-election-as-kogi-state-governor\/","title":{"rendered":"Court of Appeal Affirms Usman Ododo&#8217;s Election as Kogi State Governor"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Court of Appeal in Abuja on Thursday upheld Usman Ododo\u2019s (APC) election as Governor of Kogi State.<\/p>\n<p>The three-member panel of justices, in a judgment, agreed with the state election tribunal that the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and its governorship candidate, Murtala Ajaka, failed to prove all the allegations in their petition beyond a reasonable doubt.<\/p>\n<p>The appellate court held that the petitioners\u2019 witnesses were incompetent because their statements did not accompany the petition in line with electoral laws.<\/p>\n<p>The appeal court also held that the issue of alleged certificate forgery against Mr Ododo ought to have commenced at the Federal High Court, being a pre-election matter.<\/p>\n<p>Consequently, the appeal court held that the appellants could not prove their case \u201cbeyond reasonable doubt,\u201d thereby upholding Ododo\u2019s election.<\/p>\n<p>The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that SDP and Ajaka had, in the petition, sued INEC, Mr Ododo and the APC as 1st to 3rd respondents respectively.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Court of Appeal in Abuja on Thursday upheld Usman Ododo\u2019s (APC) election as Governor of Kogi State. The three-member panel of justices, in a judgment, agreed with the state election tribunal that the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and its governorship candidate, Murtala Ajaka, failed to prove all the allegations in their petition beyond a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":38506,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[186],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38505","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38505"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38505\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38507,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38505\/revisions\/38507"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}