In order to obtain sensitive materials utilised by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) for the February 25 presidential election, Bola Ahmed Tinubu is asking the Court of Appeal for a ruling.

His attorney, Akintola Makinde, stated that in order to prepare his defence against petitions that attempt to invalidate Tinubu’s election, he would need to examine, scan, and make duplicates of some of the electoral materials.

This was said by Makinde on Tuesday, March 7, during the session for the day in Abuja.

In order to change the instructions that had previously been given to Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) to check materials used in the 2016 presidential election, INEC had petitioned the Presidential Election Petition Court.

At the day’s sitting, 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. 

They 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, on the ground that it will cause serious delay in the governorship election for March 11. 

He added that 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. 

The Court of Appeal Abuja had on March 3 granted the request of Obi and Atiku to have access to all the sensitive materials INEC deployed for the conduct of the presidential election held on February 25.

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