ABUJA– Candidate of the Labour Party, Mr. Peter Obi, has stormed the Presidential Election Petition Court, PEPC, sitting at the Court of Appeal in Abuja, to await ruling on request by the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, to be allowed to reconfigure the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, BVAS, it used for the presidential election.
Obi, arrived the tribunal, in company of some of his supporters, among whom included the Senator-elect for Anambra Central Senatorial District, Chief Victor Umeh.
The tribunal is expected to also rule on request by the President-elect, Bola Tinubu, of the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, to be granted access to sensitive materials INEC used for the presidential election that held on February 25.
Both Obi and the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Atiku Abubakar, had urged the court to refuse INEC’s request.
INEC had insisted that the reconfiguration was necessary since the BVAS would also be deployed for the next round of elections, starting with Governorship and State Assembly elections billed for Saturday, as well as other rescheduled elections.
It maintained that without a prompt variation of the order the court earlier granted 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, also sought permission to be allowed to conduct physical inspection of all the BVAS that were used for the presidential poll.
Obi and the LP, through their team of lawyers led by Dr. Onyechi Ikpeazu, SAN, said the essence of their application was to enable them to extract data embedded in the BVAS, “which represent the actual results from Polling Units”.
They specifically applied for; “leave to carryout digital forensic and physical inspection of BVAS, etc”, as well as to obtain the Certified True Copy, CTC, of all the data in the BVAS.
“My lords, this is to ensure that the evidence is preserved before the BVAS are reconfigured by INEC. This is because if they are wiped out, it will affect the substance of our case”, Ikpeazu, SAN, added.
INEC had declared Tinubu of the APC as winner of the presidential poll, ahead of 17 other candidates that contested the election.
According to INEC, Tinubu, scored a total of 8,794,726 votes to defeat Atiku who polled a total of 6,984,520 votes and Obi of the LP who came third with a total of 6,101,533 votes.
However, both PDP and the LP rejected the outcome of the election and vowed to challenge it in court.
