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…As Obi seeks physical inspection of BVAS
From Godwin Tsa, Abuja
The Presidential Election Petition Tribunal (PEPT), has slated Wednesday to rule on the application the Independent filed by the National Electoral Commission, INEC, to be allowed to reconfigure the Bi-modal Voter Accreditation System, BVAS, used for the just concluded presidential election.
Meanwhile, the Labour Party, LP, and its candidate, Mr. Peter Obi have filed a fresh application for the physical inspection of all the BVAS that was used for the February 25 presidential election.
Obi and his political platform explained that the application was to enable them to extract data embedded in the BVAS, “which represent the actual results from Polling Units”.
Besides they equally applied to obtain the Certified True Copy, CTC, of all the data in the BVAS.
Addressing the three- member tribunal led by Justice Joseph Ikyegh, counsel to the applicants, Dr. Onyechi Ikpeazu, SAN, said, “My lords, this is to ensure that the evidence is preserved before the BVAS are reconfigured by INEC. This is because if they are wiped out, it will affect the substance of the case”.
However, INEC, through its team of lawyers comprising of four Senior Advocates of Nigeria, SAN, led by Mr Tanimu Inuwa, urged the court to refuse the application.
INEC insisted that granting the request by Obi and LP would affect its preparations for the impending Governorship and National Assembly elections.
It told the court that there are about 176, 000 BVAS that were deployed to polling units during the presidential election.
Each polling unit has its own particular BVAS machine which we need to configure for the forthcoming elections.
“It will be very difficult for us, within the period, to reconfigure the 176, 000 BVAS.
“We have already stated in our affidavit that no information in the BVAS will be lost as we will transfer all the data in the BVAS to our backend server
“We need the BVAS configured. So, granting this application will be a clog in the process and may delay the conduct of the elections”, INEC’s lawyer, Inuwa, SAN, pleaded.
After it had listened to the parties, Justice Joseph Ikyegh led the panel adjourned ruling on the matter till Wednesday.
