INEC Chairman Receives Labour Party’s Legal Team, Assures Compliance

Prof. Mahmood Yakubu,Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has assured the Labour Party, LP’s legal team of the Commission’s readiness to provide all documents the party requested to prosecute its case at the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal.

The INEC boss gave the assurance on Monday when he received the team of 60 lawyers led by Livy Uzoukwu.

Addressing the team, Yakubu said the Commission would also meet with its Resident Electoral Commissioners, RECs, in the states to work out modalities for the inspection of materials in the states.

“INEC has nothing to hide. Documents available at the headquarters will be given immediately.

“We are meeting with Resident Electoral Commissioners today and we will discuss how other documents at the state level could also be made available to you speedily,” he stated.

The Labour Party’s legal team was at the INEC headquarters to discuss modalities for obtaining the documents.

Recall that the party had earlier obtained a court judgement directing the electoral umpire to allow it inspect the materials used for the February 25 polls.

Also, the Presidential Election Petition Court, PEPC, sitting at the Court of Appeal in Abuja, last Wednesday, gave INEC the nod to reconfigure the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, BVAS, it used for the presidential election.

The court, in a unanimous decision by a three-member panel of justices, held that stopping the electoral body from reconfiguring the BVAS would adversely affect Saturday’s governorship and state assemblies elections.

It dismissed objections that the Labour Party, LP, and its presidential candidate, Mr. Peter Obi, raised against INEC’s move to reconfigure all the BVAS.

According to the court, allowing the objections by Obi and his party would amount to “tying the hands of the respondent, INEC.”

Besides, it noted that INEC had in an affidavit it filed before the court, assured that the accreditation data contained in the BVAS could not be tampered with or lost, as they would be stored and easily retrieved from its accredited back-end server.