Tribunal to Commence Trial of Disputed Cross River Guber Elections 

By Our Reporter

he governorship elections petition tribunal in Cross River State has fixed July 10th 2023 to commence trial of the disputed Cross River gubernatorial elections.

The head of the three-man tribunal Justice Oken Inneh disclosed this at the end of the pretrial session of the tribunal.

Justice Inneh who read out the tribunals pretrial decision/ ruling said the tribunal will commence daily sitting from the 10th of July 2023 till the trial is concluded except otherwise stated.

Justice Inneh asked the parties to adhere to the time management allotted to them to call their witnesses.

She also disclosed that the petitioner and the 1st respondent are expected to call 20 witnesses which comprise 17 regular and 3 supoboned.

The second and third respondents will call 12 witnesses comprising 3 regular and 9 supoboned while the fourth respondent will call 8 witnesses comprising 7 regular and 1 supoboned.

In addition, the examination in Chief will not be more than 30 minutes for the witnesses and a re-examination, if any will only last for ten minutes and parties will have ten days to prove its case.

The tribunal also ruled that all applications withdrawn without objection, the counter affidavits are deemed to have been withdrawn and so have been struck out.

As part of the day’s proceedings, various applications by all parties comprising the petitioners, APC, INEC were withdrawn because they had either been overtaken by events or fresh ones filed.

Speaking at the end of the day’s proceedings, counsel to Governor Bassey Otu, Professor Mike Ozekhome SAN, said as part of the day’s proceedings, they had moved two motions.

According to him, "one of them deals with striking out grounds 2 and 3 with the entire petition for being an abuse of court process and also for being contrary to the provisions of the Constitution and the electoral act of 2022.

"The second petition is challenging their own reply to our petition to our petition because in their response they were stating nee grounds of the petition which were never part and parcel of the original petition

"This means that such grounds under the electoral act cannot be entertained to we argued it out and also told the honourable tribunal that going by the provisions of the Constitution, sub section 8 of the 1999 Constitution, ruling on these various applications will be deferred and delivered at the time of the final judgment", he said.

On his part, Dr Joshua Yusuf, SAN, counsel for Professor Sandy Onor of the PDP said all pending applications were taken and ruling reserved until the final determination of the petition.