[EXCLUSVE] INEC ICT Director To Testify Against Obi, Atiku As Tribunal Reconvenes July 3

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has prepared witnesses, including Dr. Lawrence Bayode, Deputy Director in the ICT Department, to testify in defense of Bola Tinubu’s election victory as the Presidential Election Petitions Court reconvenes on July 3.

VerseNews Nigeria reports that the petitioners, including Peter Obi and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) with Atiku Abubakar, had presented evidence and witnesses, claiming that INEC’s failure to upload scanned polling unit results in real-time violated the Electoral Act 2022 and constituted electoral fraud.

Obi and Atiku had presented experts to challenge INEC’s claims of technical glitches. Bayode’s witness statement highlighted the efforts made by INEC’s technical team to resolve the issues with the results viewing portal, BVAS machines, and the upload of results.

He asserted that the downtime lasted for 4 hours and 50 minutes, but the first presidential result was successfully uploaded. Bayode explained that the BVAS machines can work offline and upload data when data service is available, and this offline transmission did not compromise the integrity of the result upload.

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Obi in his claims has tendered several documentary evidences and called a total of 13 witnesses that testified before the Tribunal.

Among exhibits he tendered before the court included polling unit results from 36 states of the federation and the Federal Capital Territory, FCT, Abuja, as well as a bundle of documents containing the total number of Permanent Voters Card, PVCs, that were collected in 32 states prior to the 2023 general elections.

Aside from tendering four video exhibits, one of which was a press conference, where the Chairman of the INEC, Prof. Mahmoud Yakubu, assured that results of the election would be electronically transmitted to the IReV portal in real-time using the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) machines, Obi and his party, equally tendered bundle of documents that contained the total number of registered voters in each of the states.

Other electoral documents the court admitted in evidence were certified true copies of INEC Forms EC40Gs; EC40G1; EC40GPU, which were reports of various polling units were elections did not hold.

INEC has five days to present its witnesses, followed by Tinubu’s legal team. The court is expected to conclude the evidence presentation by July, with final addresses in August, and the judgment on the petitions is scheduled for September.