The President-elect, Bola Ahmed Tinubu and his party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), on Tuesday, approached the Court of Appeal in Abuja, praying it to order the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), to grant access to sensitive materials it used for the February 25 presidential election.
Tinubu, 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.
DIPLOMATIC DIARY earlier reported that INEC had on March 4 asked the Court to vary the request which were 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 last presidential election.
But at the court on Tuesday, Counsel for the LP, Onyechi Ikpeazu, said his team needs a physical inspection of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) to enable them carry out a forensic inspection.
He also asked that the evidences are preserved before they are configured by INEC.
Counsel for INEC, Tanimu Inuwa, however, asked the court to dismiss the application for the inspection of BIVAS on the ground that it will cause serious delay in the governorship election for March 11.
Inuwa said there are 176,000 polling units across the country and each have 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 will be lost as they have transferred the data to their backend server.
However, the Court has scheduled ruling for 2pm 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.
