The Court of Appeal headquarters, Abuja, cleared the air over report trending on social media that a member of the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC), Justice Boloukuoromo Moses Ugo, has resigned from the five-man panel.
Chief Registrar of the court, Malam Umar Mohammed Bangari, dismissed the report and appealed to Nigerians to ignore the fake news in its entirety.
Reacting on the purported resignation of Justice Ugo from the PEPC, Bangari told judiciary correspondents that the report was the handiwork of armchair bloggers who would stop at nothing in reeling out fake and unsubstantiated news.
The Chief Registrar of the Court of Appeal insisted that there was no iota of truth in the report which has gained traction in media space.
Bangari said, “Justice Ugo is still on the panel of Justices of the Court” handling the petitions by the Allied Peoples Movement (APM), Labour Party (LP) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
Bangari while faulting the report said that neither his office nor the information department of the court was contacted before dishing out what he called “false report”.
The news of the purported resignation of Justice Ugo from the Bench, citing demands “to kneecap democracy”, broke out on the internet in the wee hours of Thursday.
The online report stated that Justice Ugo resigned from the bench, citing demands from the executive branch that he believes would destroy the country’s democracy.
In the statement as reported by the online platform, Justice Ugo said that siding with the government on the petitions challenging the election of Bola Ahmed Tinubu would be the “death of Nigeria’s democracy” and that he could not in good conscience remain silent.
According to Justice Ugo’s purported statement, he was asked to “cripple the independence of the judiciary” by ruling in favour of a certain political candidate, whom he did not name but is widely believed to be Bola Tinubu.