The Labour Party (LP) and its presidential candidate, Peter Obi, have accused the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) of failure to provide them with 70 per cent of the documents required to prosecute their petition at the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal.
The court had on May 10, adjourned LP and Obi’s petition to Wednesday, May 17, to enable parties in the matter to agree on non-contentious issues to be relied on during the hearing.
But at the resumed hearing yesterday, LP and Obi’s lead counsel, Livy Uzoukwu (SAN), informed the court that the team met INEC’s legal department about six times for it to certify and release Form EC8As (polling unit result sheets), especially from Rivers and Sokoto states, to no avail as contained in the order of March 25.
While he claimed that the Resident Electoral Commissioner (REC) in Rivers told them boldly that there were no Form EC8As to be given, in Sokoto they were asked to bring N1.5m.
However, counsel to INEC, Abubakar Mahmoud (SAN), informed the court that they were willing to cooperate with the LP team to obtain all the necessary materials.
He said he had earlier scheduled a meeting with the LP lawyers on May 15 and 16, but that they walked away because they allegedly were not provided with the materials they pleaded in their petition.
Lawyers to president-elect, Bola Tinubu, Wole Olanipekun (SAN), and that of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Lateef Fagbemi (SAN), both submitted that failure to supply the materials might be because of non-payment of certification fees.
