Yakubu Busari
The Governorship Election Tribunal sitting In Jos Division of Plateau State has resumed hearing after the end of the prehearing session that produced scheduled documents as guidelines for the daily proceedings.
The counsel to the petitioners, Dr Nentawe Yilwatda and his party the All Progressive Congress, APC, Prof.Kayode Olutoike, SAN, said the trial is ready to proceed and the petitioners subpoenaed the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, and Nigeria Police Plateau State Command, Commissioner to produce the election polling units results.
He stressed that these are documents pleaded by the petitioners inside the first and second scheduled documents and are with the secretary of the tribunal the documents were supported to be made available to the court which is BVAS Data extracted from the machines.
According to him, the petitioners asked for certified True copies, CTC, and date information extracted from the BVAS machines expected from a few local governments and they are item two of the subpoena preference is CTC and copies of PVCs collected from the voters in Plateau state during the March,18th,2023 general elections in the 17 LGAs set out as item 3 in the subpoena.
However, Prof. Kayode explained further that INEC was supine to produce form EC8A downloaded from the IREVs portal in all LGA polling units with four items listed in the subpoena where the documents inside the subpoena.
Before tendering the subpoena from the INEC, Counsel to Caleb Mutfwang , Pius Akubo opposed the admissibility of the first and second scheduled documents intended to be used by the petitioners to front load documents saying that the dateline of 12/06/2023 was the only acceptable one any documents outside shall not be allowed to be tender, he said .
Akubo told the tribunal that the days of being ambushed in law are long gone, and the 3rd respondent PDP Emeka Etiaba said he agreed with the 1st and 2nd respondents’ positions.
Tendering of documents by the APC the list of PVCs collected was the first and last names of the registered voters list and sort video evidence. The INEC subpoena tendered videos and screenshots results from the IReV portal to the court by surprise this is where the pleaded in the scheduled
The petitioners’ counsel told the tribunal that he listed them in page 58 particularly the BVAS, other documents sought to be tender in evidence, however, Senior system analysis at the INEC headquarters, Mr Salisu Aliyu the ITC expert submitted the documents upon the subpoena served to the INEC Chair Prof. Mahmoud Yakubu, CTC,, BVAS machines, accreditation extracted from the BVAS back end cyber that were from form EC8A , IreV result portal.
According to Salisu, they have slide challenges in getting the complete results because of the bulky nature of the documents and BVAS use for the elections, and the tribunal warned the INEC to make available the whole results before one week.
The second INEC subpoena Festus Adam the assistant director of voters registration says the tribunal subpoenaed to REC commissioner of Plateau State but he doesn’t have the documents so they forwarded it to Chair Mahmoud to produce the voters register of governorship, election of 18/03/2023 selected from a few local governments.
The issues were the polling units portal and hard copies, the tribunal asked for CTC and sorted out the results
The tribunal adjourns sitting to the 27th of June 2023 to enable parties to come together and agree on the modality of how to tender bulky documents of 28 paragraphs for easy marking.
Meanwhile, the OC legal Plateau State Police Command, ASP Okole Umorem tendered results of the elections in various polling units of Plateau on 18/03/2023 in compliance with the directive issued by the CP.
He presented the election result portal of Jos South,37 copies, Langtang South LGA 11 copies , Mangu 7 copies Quanpan 3 copies Bassa 3 ,Jos East 1 ,Mikang 2 ,Langtang North 4 ,Shendam 1,Kanam 1 ,B/Ladi 13 when completed he appeal to the court that they were unable to produce the whole results .
However, the tribunal ordered police to ensure that they produce the entire results within one week.
The tribunal granted the APC two of the applications to take 1&2 of it scheduled dated 12 days of June ,2023 and 25th day of June 2023
