Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, the Presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), has brought in two more witnesses to support his claim of electoral misconduct during the February 25 election.
With these additions, he has now called a total of 18 witnesses out of the planned 100 witnesses for the case. Abubakar and his party filed a petition against President Bola Tinubu and his party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), as well as the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), at the Presidential Election Petition Court in Abuja.
They argue that INEC did not conduct the election in compliance with the provisions of the Electoral Act 2022. During the recent court hearing, one of Abubakar’s new witnesses, Ms. Alheri Ayuba, expressed her dissatisfaction with the inability to upload results from her polling unit to INEC’s Result Viewing Portal.
She explained that she could not access the portal and suggested that if she had, the result could have been saved as “pending” until network connectivity was restored. The witness also confirmed that she was not influenced or bribed by any politician before or during the election.
The second witness, Ms. Sadiya Haruna, informed the court that the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System machine she used malfunctioned. She stated that she manually recorded the result at her polling unit, and party agents overseeing the process at the unit were present. Haruna also took a photo of the manually collated result, but she was uncertain whether it was stored in the machine.
The objections to the admission of the witnesses’ statements in evidence were raised by INEC’s counsel and the counsel for President Bola Tinubu and Vice-President Kashim Shettima, but they did not object to the witnesses testifying in court or presenting their employment letters as Presiding Officers for the election.
The final ruling on these objections will be reserved until the judgment. The court has also adjourned further hearing in the petition until June 13.
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