Obi seeks court’s order to interrogate INEC on technologies deployed for presidential election

CHIGOZIE IKPO, Abuja 

The Presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP) in the February 25 Presidential election, Mr Peter Obi, Thursday, sought an order of the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC) to Interrogate the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) on the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) deployed and the experts used for the conduct of the election.

In two separate motions filed on May 26 and June 2 respectively and argued on his behalf by Mr Patrick Ikweto, SAN, Obi sought to know the quality of the ICT experts deployed in the use of technology for the conduct of election.

In the two motions, Obi and LP prayed to the Court to compel INEC to supply them with names and profiles of ICT personnel that handled the technological aspects of the election.

They posed 12 questions to be forwarded to the electoral body for answers so as to aid him and LP in establishing their allegations of poor conduct especially malpractices in the conduct of the election.

He claimed that the request if granted would assist him in the effective presentation of his petition challenging the declaration of Bola Ahmed Tinubu as the winner of the election.

However, INEC represented by Mr Kemi Pinhero, SAN objected to Obi’s bid to subject his client to interrogation through incompetent applications.

The senior lawyer argued that Obi’s applications had become belated because he brought them outside the time allowed by law.

Specifically, Pinhero argued that such an application ought to have been brought and argued during the pre-hearing session, adding that bringing the application outside the pre-hearing session has robbed the court of jurisdiction to hear it.

He insisted that the application must fail because it is a waste of time, adding that the precious time of the court must not be expended on such a request.

President Tinubu represented by Chief Akin Olujimi, SAN and the All Progressives Congress (APC), represented by Prince Lateef Fagbemi, SAN, also kicked against granting of the request, insisting that the application is grossly incompetent in the face of the law.

Meanwhile, the Presiding Justice, Haruna Tsammani has reserved a ruling on the applications.

Earlier, the party presented her second witness, Anthony Chinwo, a Software Engineer and an Architect who monitored the technologies used for the election including the Amazon Web Services (AWS) used by INEC to store the data from the BiModal Voter Accreditation System. 

Chinwo told the court that he made use of the publicly available Application Programming Interface (API) device to collect data on the elections. 

He explained that the API supplies information to the IReV portal and that he was able to monitor and collect data from polling units. 

While he agreed that INEC transmitted the details of the Election to its servers, Chinwo said it failed to do so in real-time. 

Justice Tsammani fixed June 9 for a further hearing into the petition.