Bola-Ahmed Tinubu seeks court permission to obtain election materials
Bola-Ahmed Tinubu, Nigeria’s President-Elect from the All Progressive Congress has urged the court of Appeal in Abuja to order the Independent National Electoral Commission to grant him access to sensitive materials it used for the presidential election.
Speaking through his lawyer, Mr 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.
Furthermore Makinde said that the materials will be relevant in helping them to prepare their defence and also make comparison with the information contained in INEC’s back-end server.”
In addition, Mr. Omosanya Kpopoola, Counsel for APC also urged the court to permit the party to also obtain copies of the sensitive materials from the electoral body.
The applications came on the day that both Obi and Atiku urged the court to refuse INEC’s request to be allowed to reconfigure the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) it used for the presidential election.
Meanwhile, Tinubu’s first ex-parte application, which was filed on March 6, has the LP and its presidential candidate, Peter Obi as respondents, in the second application, the PDP and its candidate, Atiku Abubakar, were cited as respondents, alongside INEC.
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INEC Requests BVAS from Court
INEC had requested to get the BVAS machines from court, insisting that the reconfiguration was necessary since the BVAS would also be deployed for the next round of elections, starting with governorship and state assemblies elections billed for Saturday, as well as other rescheduled elections.
The commission maintained that the court earlier granted permission to Obi and Atiku especially the aspect restraining it from tampering with formation contained in the BVAS, it would be difficult for it to proceed with the scheduled elections.
However, Obi and his party, in a fresh application marked CA/PEC/09m/23, sought permission to be allowed to conduct physical inspection of all the BVAS that were used for the presidential poll.
Obi and LP, through their team of lawyers led by Dr. Onyechi Ikpeazu (SAN), said the essence of the application was to enable them to extract data embedded in the BVAS, “which represent the actual results from Polling Units”.
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