President of Nigeria’s Court of Appeal, Justice Zainab Bulkachuwa, Wednesday, stepped aside as a member of the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal.
Bulkachuwa stepped down from the panel following allegations of likelihood of bias leveled against her by the Peoples Democratic Party, and its presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar.
Although the five-man panel of the tribunal, in a unanimous ruling dismissed the application, Bulkachuwa said she was withdrawing for “personal reasons.”
Justice Olabisi Ige, who read the lead ruling of the panel, held that the relationship between Justice Bulkachuwa and her husband, Adamu Bulkachuwa, who is a senator-elect, and her son Aliyu Abubakar, a governorship aspirant, both on the platform of the All Progressives Congress, was not weighty enough to infer that she would be biased in her handling of the proceedings of the panel.
Justice Ige also ruled that no inference of likelihood of bias could be inferred from the speech delivered by Justice Bulkachuwa at the inaugural sitting of the tribunal on May 8 that she had pre-judged the petitioners’ petition.