PEPC: Obi, LP Tenders Over 18,000 Blurred Polling Unit Results In Evidence Against Tinubu
The presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP), Mr. Peter Obi, and his party tendered 18,088 blurred polling unit results of the February 25 presidential election before the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC) on Thursday in aid of their joint petition challenging the declaration of Bola Tinubu as the winner of the election.
Obi and the Labour Party, in their petition marked CA/PEPC/03/2023, want the court to annul the election that brought Bola Tinubu into power on the ground of gross violation of the Constitution, electoral law, and the guidelines by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) for the conduct of the election.
The petitioners, who listed INEC, Tinubu, Vice President Kashim Shettima, and the All Progressives Congress (APC) as respondents in their petition, called their fourth witness (PW 4), Prof. Eric Ofoegbu, before the court, through whom the documents were tendered.
Eric Uwaduegwu Ofoegbu, a professor of Mathematics at the Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Anambra, on Thursday told the Presidential Election Petition Court sitting in Abuja that from the INEC Result Viewing Portal, IREV, 18,088 polling unit results were blurred but when compared with Form EC8As (polling unit results) given to Labour Party agents at the affected PUs, votes of 2,565,269 accredited voters were not reflected in the final results announced by the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, Yakubu Mahmood.
This was contained in Ofoegbu’s statement on oath admitted before the PEPC after being lead to give his evidence in chief by the lawyer representing the LP presidential candidate, Peter Obi, Onyechi Ikpeazu SAN.
In his statement on oath, the professor, who said he specializes in numerical functional analysis and data science, disclosed that the affected scores from the polling units which favoured Obi was recovered using LP agents EC8A copies and certified true copies of EC8As as supplied by INEC.
He said on February 20, 2023 he was engaged by the Labour party and was later subpoenaed to carry out a data analysis on the election results state by state.
“I observed that, from IREV portal, scores on Form EC8As of 39,546 polling units were inaccessible – contain uploads not connected with the Presidential Election.
“From IREV portal, 18,088 polling units results were blurred. This number of PUs negatively impacted the votes of 2,565,269 accredited voters and 9,165,191 voters that collected their PVCS,” he said.
According to him, overvoting checks on the 2023 presidential election showed that 4,457 polling units with a total of 2,317,129 PVCs collected were affected, adding that the figure exceeds the margin of lead of 1,807, 206 votes over the first runner declared by INEC, that is, Atiku Abubakar.
On the 39,546 polling units allegedly not accessible on IREV, Ofoedu disclosed that both the number of accredited voters (5,532,553) and the number of PVCs collected (23,119, 298) exceeded the margins of lead by far from the INEC-announced results (1,807,206 over Atiku and 2,693,193 over Obi).
Citing Rivers State as an example, the witness said: “From results on IREV portal, LP got 208,564 votes while APC got 118,999 votes in Rivers state as against 175,071 votes for LP and 231,591 votes for APC as announced by INEC.”
In Benue state for instance, he said in the court document that a final vote count of 281,426 votes for Obi and 258,683 votes for Tinubu were obtained after he added actual votes on the Form EC8As obtained from LP agents in the state.
He was of the view that there is no correlation between the results declared by the INEC Chairman and what is available on the IREV portal or CTC of Forms EC8As from the polling units as supplied by the electoral umpire.
At the proceedings on Thursday, he asked the court to adopt his statement on oath while admitting his evidence as Obi’s exhibits against the 2023 presidential election.
But before he spoke, the respondent’s counsel, Abubakar Mahmoud (SAN) for INEC, Chief Wole Olanipakun (SAN) for Tinubu and Shettima, and Lateef Fagbemi (SAN) for the APC, objected to the admissibility of the statement of the witness.
INEC, through its counsel, told the court that they had just been served with the statement of the witness and would need time to go through it.
“To be honest, I and my team are handicapped and do not know how to proceed. It is an ambush,” he told the court, adding that if the petitioners would wish to continue, they should ask for a step down to allow the respondents to study the statement properly.
Olanipakun aligned himself with Mahmoud’s submission, saying, “We don’t mind taking the witness, but, in the alternative, he can be taken in evidence in chief today and cross-examined later”.
Fagbemi also told the court that they were also served with the statement Thursday morning, which aligned with the submission of Olanipakun.
The petitioners’ counsel apologised for serving the respondents late but told the court that they obtained the subpoena on Wednesday and requested that the witness be allowed to adopt his evidence in chief while the court determines whether or not cross-examination will be done later.
All the respondents objected to the adoption of the statement of the witness and the documents sought to be tendered and reserved their responses until their final written addresses.
They also objected to both the subpoena and the engagement letter and reserved their responses for the final address stage.
Fagbemi, for the APC, objected to the subpoena and not to the letter.
However, the court admitted all the documents tendered in evidence, marked them as exhibits, and reserved its ruling until the day of judgement in the petition.
The petitioners’ 5th witness (PW 5), Lummie Edevbie, from Arise News Television, was called and was led in evidence by the petitioners’ counsel.
The petitioners tendered in evidence through the witness a flash drive containing the video of the speech by the INEC Chairman, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, at the Chatham House, where he spoke about the elections, giving assurances on the potency of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) machine and the IReV portals ahead of the general elections.
The respondents objected to the video being played but the court noted their assertion but ordered that it be played.
However, the five-man panel of the court led by Justice Hassan Tsammani, adjourned until tomorrow, Friday, June 16, for the witness’s cross-examination and additional petition hearings.
