Presidential Election Petition Court Announces Date For Adoption In Atiku, Obi’s Petitions Against Tinubu, INEC

Eko Hot Blog reports that the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC) has fixed tomorrow for all parties to adopt their written addresses in the petitions filed by Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) against the declaration of President Bola Tinubu as winner of the February 25 presidential election.

After the scheduled adoption processes, the Justice Haruna Tsammani-led five-member panel will then fix a date for judgment in the two petitions.

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According to The Sun, Atiku and Obi before closing their individual petitions called in a total of 40 witnesses to substantiate their allegations against the February 25 presidential poll that returned Tinubu of the APC as president.

Their grouse is that INEC failed to transmit election results in real-time as promised by its Chairman, Prof Yakubu Mahmood. They also submitted that Tinubu ought not to be on the ballot over alleged perjury, discrepancies in his academic records in addition to alleged criminal forfeiture.

Atiku in his petition marked: CA/PEPC/05/2023, specifically told the panel that, “the non-compliance substantially affected the result of the election, in that Tinubu ought not to have been declared or returned as the winner of the election.”

Similarly, Obi in his petition marked CA/PEPC/03/2023, insisted he and not Tinubu won the presidential election; accusing the electoral umpire of manipulating the scores recorded in the Bi-modal Verification Accreditation System (BVAS) machines, as well as falsifying figures at various collation centers across the country to favour Tinubu and APC.

To buttress their individual petitions and convince the justices to sack Tinubu as President, while Atiku called 27 witnesses, Obi called 13, including experts and INEC’s adhoc workers who acted as Presiding Officers during the election.

The testimonies of the witnesses among others are that INEC deliberately refused to comply with its guidelines requiring it to transmit election results real time, from the Bi-modal Verification Accreditation System (BVAS) to the INEC’s Results Viewing ( IReV) portals, adding that INEC’s claim of encountering some “technical glitches” while uploading the presidential election results was untrue.

The petitioners had brought in video evidence which was played before the panel showing Mahmood and INEC’s National Commissioner for Information and Voter Education, assuring Nigerians and the international community that there is no going back on electronic transmission of election results.

Besides the testimonies of the witnesses, the petitioners presented before the court bundles of evidence such as polling units’ results, wards’ results, local government areas’ results, states’ results as well as the final result, which they said INEC manipulated to make Tinubu president.

While INEC and Tinubu called in just one witness each, APC opted to adopt the witness and evidence of Tinubu as its own defence against Atiku and Obi’s petition.

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However both President Tinubu, APC and INEC have all argued that petitioners failed to show how the result of the election was manipulated in favour of the president and that they scored the majority of lawful votes during the disputed polls.

According to the respondents counsel, the evidence presented by the petitioners failed to make out a case that the 2nd and 3rd respondents are not qualified to contest the election.

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