March 07, (THEWILL) – Nigeria’s President-elect, Bola Ahmed Tinubu and his party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), have approached the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC), in Abuja, to seek an order to inspect materials used by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) for the February 25 presidential election.
INEC earlier asked the Court to vary the request, which was earlier granted to the candidates of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku Abubakar and Labour Party (LP)’s Peter Obi, to inspect materials used for the last presidential election.
At the court session on Tuesday, the president-elect, through his lawyer, Akintola Makinde, said he would need to inspect, scan and make photocopies of some of the electoral materials, to enable him to prepare his defence against petitions that would seek to nullify his election.
“The materials will be relevant in helping us to prepare our defence and also make comparison with the information contained in INEC’s back-end server”, Makinde said.
Also, counsel for the LP, Onyechi Ikpeazu, said his team needs a physical inspection of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS), to enable them to carry out a forensic inspection.
They also asked that the evidence be preserved before they are configured by INEC.
Counsel for INEC, Tanimu Inuwa, however, asked the court to dismiss the application for the inspection of BVAS on the ground that it will cause a serious delay in the governorship election for March 11.
Inuwa said there are 176,000 polling units across the country and each has its own unique BVAS machine, which needs to be configured and it will be very difficult for them to configure such within a short period.
He assured that no data would be lost, as they had transferred the data to their backend server.
However, the Court has scheduled a ruling for 2 pm on Wednesday, on the motion filed by Tinubu and the APC.
A three-member panel, presided over by Justice Joseph Ikyegh, chose the date and time after lawyers to Tinubu and APC, Akintola Makinde and Omosanya Popoola, moved the four ex-parte motions they filed.
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