A witness for the Labour Party on Thursday accused the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) of an attempt to sabotage the 2023 presidential election.
At the resumed hearing, the presidential election tribunal, saw the LP bring forward its witness, Anthony Chinwo, who is a software engineer.
Under cross examination by legal counsels to the INEC, President Bola Tinubu, and the All-Progressives Congress (APC), Mr. Chinwo said that he conducted investigations around the uploading of results to the Irev portal by electoral umpire and discovered that there was a deliberate plot to undermine the electoral process.
These claims infuriated A.B Mahmood, the INEC counsel who objected and insisted that from the documents presented before the court, INEC used the highest level of software security.
After listening to the witness statement and the counterclaims by the defense counsel, the presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP), Peter Obi, was allowed to submit to the court, the official national results of the February 25 presidential election.
Counsel to the LP, Professor Paul Ananaba (SAN) tendered the form EC8DA, which is the official national results of the election.
Ananaba also tendered the remaining exhibits in forms EC8As, EC8Bs and EC8Cs, which are polling units, wards, and local government’s collation respectively for about 18 states where they are challenging the election results.
Some of the states tendered and admitted are Bayelsa, Benue, Cross River, Ebonyi, Edo, Lagos, Niger, Ondo, Oyo, Rivers, Sokoto, Ekiti and Delta.
In a slight twist of events, INEC did not object to the Labour Party (LP) and Peter Obi’s submission of result sheets of the national collation for the February 25 presidential election.
There was no reason given for the non-objection position taken by INEC’s counsel.
In a similar vein, the lawyers for President Bola Tinubu and the All-Progressives Congress (APC), Akin Olujinmi (SAN) and Lateef Fagbemi (SAN), did not oppose the submission made by the LP and its candidate, however, they objected to results the opposition party said it obtained from polling units, wards, local governments, and states.
LP’s counsel, Ananaba informed the court that they are ready to tender forms EC40G series, which are forms for materials distribution across states, at the next hearing.
He said they will be responding to the reasons made for objecting and not objecting to the documents tendered before the court.
