Nairobi- Nigeria's Supreme Court on Thursday set October 23 as the date for a court case challenging the April 2007 election of President Umaru Yar'Adua.

Muhammadu Buhari and Atiku Abubakar, presidential candidates of the All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP) and the Action Congress respectively, filed the petitions after they had lost at the lower Court of Appeal on March 8.

Justice James Ogebe, in the March judgment, upheld the election of Yar'Adua and held that Buhari and Atiku did not present sufficient materials to prove their claims that the election was rigged.

Political analysts believe that the case will fail at the Supreme Court, going by precedents set in the cases of eight governors of the ruling People's Democratic Party
(PDP), who all defeated petitions filed against them.

"People crying about rigging of election for Yar'Adua are only being mischievous,"" said Adam Etuk of the Centre for Democratic Upliftment, a non-governmental organization. "Which party did not rig in the 2007 election?"

A top PDP official, John Arubume, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa that Buhari in particular was wasting his time, since the party on whose platform he contested the election has members serving as Yar'Adua's ministers.

"The ANPP even told Buhari to go and form his own party if he was not satisfied with the cooperation between the ruling party and the ANPP," he said. (dpa)