Presidential tribunal: Obi’s final witness testifies

The Labour Party and its presidential candidate, Peter Obi, on Friday, called the last set of witnesses to testify in his petition against the victory of Bola Tinubu in the last presidential election.

Respondents in the matter are the Independent National Electoral Commission; Tinubu, his vice—Kashim Shettima—and their party, the All Progressives Congress.

During Friday’s proceedings, Yunusa Tanko, who identified himself as the chief spokesman of the LP’s Presidential Election Council, told the court that his party filed several suits before the general elections.

Tanko, who testified as a witness, identified a copy of a court’s ruling that emanated from a case filed by the LP against INEC, wherein the LP, before the elections, sought to compel INEC to transmit the results of the elections electronically.

The Certified True Copy of the judgement was admitted in evidence and marked as Exhibit S1.

However, according to the judgement, which was read in court, all the reliefs that were sought were refused as the high court held that nothing in the Electoral Act stipulated how INEC should transmit election results.

It further held that INEC was at liberty to stipulate the manner in which the election results should be transmitted.

When the witness was shown copies of some results of the presidential election and asked to read out the scores that were recorded for parties in the case, he said the documents were mutilated. Yunusa equally said that over 18,088 results of the presidential election that INEC uploaded to its IReV portal, were blurred.

He maintained that votes were allotted to all the presidential candidates by INEC.

He said, “If the results were uploaded as required by the law, my party would have gotten more votes than what was allocated to us.”

The witness told the court that unlawful votes were credited to President Tinubu by INEC.

He prayed the court to void the results of the election in its entirety.

Meanwhile, the petitioners on Friday through their lead counsel, Livy Uzoukwu, SAN, informed the court that his clients would close their case at that point.

Although the LP and Obi had said they would call 50 witnesses to testify in the matter, they closed their case on Friday after fielding 13 witnesses.

Following the agreement of all the parties, the PEPC, headed by Justice Haruna Tsammani, adjourned the case till July 3 for INEC to open its defence to the petition. Punch