Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, who claimed that the 2023 presidential election was rigged, applied on Tuesday to summon the chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, Prof. Mahmoud Yakubu, to appear before the Presidential Election Petition Court, PEPC, sitting in Abuja.
Atiku, who finished second in the February 25 presidential election, also summoned the Commission’s Secretary, Dr Rose Oriarian-Anton, and INEC’s National Commissioner, Mr Festus Okoye.
The PDP candidate and former vice president said he would formally seek subpoenas to compel the trio to appear in court to testify and hand over sensitive electoral documents.
“My lords, for the benefit of the respondents, so that they will not say that we took them by surprise, we want to state that it has gotten to the stage where we will summon the National Chairman of INEC, the Secretary of the Commission, as well as the National Commissioner, to appear in court with documents.
“We had earlier indicated our intention to bring them as subpoenaed witnesses, and we have gotten to the stage where they may be required to appear in this matter.
“We have already indicated that we want them here, but by Thursday, we will make the formal application,” Atiku’s lead counsel, Chief Chris Uche, SAN, told the court.
Atiku and the PDP, who are the petitioners, made their decision to summon the INEC bosses after they produced two more witnesses that testified before the court.
It will be recalled that, despite objections from President Bola Tinubu and the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, the five-member panel led by Justice Haruna Tsammani allowed five ad hoc INEC staff members who participated in the presidential election to testify as witnesses in the case.
The five INEC ad hoc staff admitted in separate court testimony that the presidential election results were not electronically transmitted.
The witnesses testified in court that although the results of the National Assembly elections were successfully uploaded using BVAS devices, the process failed when they attempted to upload the results of the presidential election, which was held on the same day.
According to them, the BVAS malfunction prevented presidential election results from being transmitted in real-time to INEC’s I-Rev portal.
In the meantime, at the restarted proceedings yesterday, INEC informed the court that it had on May 20 objected to additional witness statements Atiku and PDP filed in support of their petition. INEC’s attorney, Mr Abubakar Mahmood, SAN, insisted that the additional statements raised new issues not contained in the original petition before the court.
The protest was raised after the petitioners called Dr Alex Adum Ter, their 19th witness. ”We objected to the additional statements on the ground that they were not covered by the petition but contained new facts.
” Your lordships reserved a ruling on that issue, and our position is that the evidence of this witness related to those pleadings. Therefore, we will have to object to the depositions of this witness that are sought to be adopted now by the witness.
“We oppose the further witness statement dated April 20. We reserve our reasons for the objection till our final address stage,” INEC’s lawyer, Mahmood, SAN, added.
The attorneys who represented President Tinubu and the APC, Chief Akin Olujinmi, SAN, and Mr Afolabi Fashanu, SAN, respectively, aligned themselves with the position of the electoral body, in contrast to counsel for the petitioners, Chief Uche, SAN, who urged the court to disregard INEC’s objection.
President Tinubu, through his lawyer, Chief Olujinmi, SAN, told the court that he equally canvassed similar arguments against replies and additional statements filed by the petitioners.
While the Justice Tsammani-led panel reserved a ruling on the issue, it adopted, in evidence, INEC’s manual for election officials as well as guidelines for the conduct of the 2023 general elections, which were tendered by the petitioners.
The court marked the two documents as Exhibits PAE-1 and PAE-2.
Afterwards, President Tinubu and the APC said they were vehemently opposed to three video recordings that Atiku and the PDP applied for the court to admit in evidence.
Atiku’s lead counsel, Chief Uche, SAN, told the court that the three video recordings were those of INEC’s Chairman, Prof. Yakubu, that of INEC’s National Commissioner, Mr Festus Okoye, as well as that of the European Union Election Observer Mission to Nigeria.
Uche, SAN, said the recordings were accompanied by certificates of authenticity as well as their transcripts.
He told the court that advanced copies were served on all the respondents to enable them to have a foreknowledge of the contents of the videos contained in flash drives.
While INEC said it was not opposed to the admissibility of the video clips, both President Tinubu and the APC said they would, in their final written address, adduce reasons why they raised objections against the video evidence.
The three flash drives, which all had their certificate of authenticity and transcript, were admitted and marked as Exhibits PAF (a) (b) (c), PAF (2) (a) (b) (c), and PAF (3) (a) (b) (c).
In the first video, Prof. Yakubu, the chairman of INEC, promises to deploy BVAS machines to all 176,846 polling places to accredit voters. He also adds that results will be transmitted in real-time from the polling places to INEC’s I-Rev portal.
The INEC chairman, who in the said conference, stressed that incident forms would not be deployed for the 2023 elections, restated the commitment of the commission to ensure that the election was free, fair, and credible so as to meet the expectations of Nigerians.
In the second video, INEC’s National Commissioner, Okoye, equally assured that the BVAS would be used to transmit the results of the elections in real-time.
Okoye stated further that in any unit where the BVAS failed to function, elections in the area would be postponed till the next day.
Similar to this, in the third video that was shown in public, a member of the EU Election Monitoring team bemoaned the fact that the INEC I-Rev portal did not provide access to the election results as promised, claiming that this had diminished public confidence in the commission.
Aside from the three video recordings, the petitioners, through the PW-19, Dr Ter also tendered in evidence screenshots from INEC’s I-Rev portal as of March 18 and 19.
They noted that as of March 1, results from 9,403 polling units in the country had yet to be uploaded to INEC’s I-Rev portal, about one week after the presidential election was held.
INEC urged the court to reject the screenshots, which it described as “strange”, saying it was surprised to see the documents as they were not previously pleaded by the petitioners.
Though all the respondents opposed the bundle of documents containing the screenshots, the panel, however, admitted it in evidence as Exhibit PAF 4A.
The witness revealed to the court during cross-examination that he is a politician and a lawyer, and that he also serves as the PDP’s national coordinator for the election situation room.
He testified in court that throughout the entire presidential election and up until the results were announced, he was not at INEC’s collation facility but rather remained at the Situation Room the party opened in Abuja.
The PW-19 said he had earlier voted at his polling unit after he was accredited.
“We had agents in all the polling units. We also had party agents in all the wards and collation centres across the country.
“In some situations, agents reported to us that elections never took place. In some polling units, violence erupted, and voting was disrupted. But in areas where elections were held peacefully, our agents signed copies of the results,” the witness told the court.
Asked if he was an ICT expert, the witness answered in the negative, though he told the court that he obtained a degree in telecom law.
“Because we worked together with statisticians in the Situation Room, I was able to see the results of the election. That was how I got to know the errors in calculation.
” I viewed the CTC of the BVAS accreditation report. The election was not electronically transmitted,” he insisted.
In response to President Tinubu’s attorney’s questions during cross-examination, the witness informed the court that INEC was responsible for the election’s technical difficulties.
However, he admitted that, though the results of the elections emerged from the polling units, he did not visit any other polling unit on the day the presidential election was held.
After he was discharged from the box, the PW-20, Capt. Olatunji Shelle, rtd, who was PDP’s collation agent in Lagos State, gave his own evidence, saying though the Labour Party won in Lagos, there was, however, massive electoral fraud.
“So many ballot boxes were snatched, and many people were injured,” the witness added.
The panel subsequently adjourned further hearings on the petition until Wednesday.
