The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), President Bola Tinubu and the All Progressives Congress (APC) who jointly stood their grounds that the witnesses must not be allowed to testify until June 8 were unsettled by the former Vice President of Nigeria, Abubakar Atiku’s decision to bring subpoenaed witnesses into the hearing of his petition on Wednesday.
Following the PEPC’s worry on Tuesday that Atiku and the PDP were releasing their exhibits in bits and pieces, their attorney, Mr Eyitayo Jegede, SAN, complained that INEC was impeding their legal action against Tinubu and the APC despite the fact that they had paid the electoral body Six Million Naira (N6,000,000) in fees. They accordingly requested and were given permission to summon witnesses at the court’s resumed hearing.
Atiku, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidate in the contested presidential election on February 25, had invited his first subpoenaed witness before the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPEC) to present some sensitive papers during the resumed hearing on Wednesday. However, INEC and Tinubu vigorously protested the action.
Through their respective solicitors, INEC, Tinubu, and the APC objected to the witness’s testimony, who was allegedly an Adhoc staff member of INEC.
Following the admission of exhibits from 10 local governments in Kogi State, lead PDP attorney Chief Chris Uche, SAN, put in one of his named witnesses who testified about how INEC failed to transfer results in real-time “as promised.”
Uche informed the court that the petitioners have three witnesses who have been subpoenaed shortly after the witness’s cross-examination, Hon. Ndubuisi Nwobu of Anambra State, finished. Uche then went to call the first witness, an Adhoc staff member of INEC.
However, immediately the witness entered the witness box and barely before he could take his oath, counsel to INEC, Mr Abubakar Mahmoud, SAN, rose in objection to the hearing of the evidence of the witness.
But as soon as the witness reached the witness box and just before he was about to take the oath, INEC’s attorney, Mr Abubakar Mahmoud, SAN, stood and objected to the hearing of the witness’s testimony.
He told the court that he had only received the witness’s statement this morning and would need to review it in order to conduct a thorough cross-examination.
Both Tinubu’s attorney, Chief Akin Olujimi, SAN, and the attorney for the APC, Prince Lateef Fagbemi, SAN, agreed with him, stating that they had only received the statement from Tinubu and had not yet read it.
In response, Uche stated that because the witness had been subpoenaed, they were not obligated to give the respondents his statement first. He also claimed that the witness’s testimony wasn’t unusual enough to call for an adjournment.
Uche begged the court to call at least one of the subpoenaed witnesses so that they could use their given time wisely and avoid having it cut short by the adjournment.
In an effort to be accommodating, the court’s presiding justice, Justice Haruna Simon Tsammani, advocated stopping the trial for 30 minutes so that respondents could review the documents and then cross-examine the first subpoenaed witness.
Following the respondents’ insistence, Uche urged the court to adjourn till tomorrow for the calling of the three subpoenaed witnesses.
Earlier in his evidence, Nwobu told the Court that the election went smoothly in most polling units he visited, including where he cast his vote, but “magic started happening” at the Ward Collation Centres.
According to him, the results of the election were entered into the forms EC8A at the polling units but were not transmitted in real-time into the IReV because of the failure of the BVAS machines.
He told the panel that, but for his intervention, some staff of INEC would have been attacked due to their inability to upload results in real-time.
“There was no real-time transmission of results as INEC promised us,” he said.
Meanwhile, further hearing into the petition has been shifted to June 8.
