INEC responds to Obi’s subpoena | LP seeks ‘non-existent’ documents — highlights of Tuesday’s tribunal session

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has sent representatives to the presidential election petition court in response to a subpoena issued by the Labour Party (LP) and its presidential candidate, Peter Obi.

Here are the major highlights of Tuesday’s proceedings.

WITNESS SUBPOENAED BY LP NOT SENT BY AMAZON

Clarita Ogar, a witness subpoenaed by the LP to give evidence in the case against President Bola Tinubu, said she was not sent to represent Amazon Web Services Incorporated, a firm which INEC engaged to provide technical support during the general election.

INEC had said its inability to upload election results to IReV in real-time was due to technical hitches related to scaling up the platform from managing off-season and state elections to nationwide polls.

But in her evidence-in-chief, Ogar, a cloud engineer and architect, said the AWS cloud did not record any technical glitch in the country on February 25.

During cross-examination on Tuesday, Ogar admitted that she was testifying as an expert witness.

She also admitted that the AWS server had suffered more than 27 outages as of 2021.

The witness contested the house of representatives election for Yala/Ogoja federal constituency in the 2023 general election under LP.

Ogar had sued INEC for omitting her name from the final list of candidates published for the election.

INEC RESPONDS TO OBI’S SUBPOENA

INEC finally responded to a subpoena issued by Obi and the LP after a series of allegations that the commission was avoiding the service of the summon.

Making an appearance before the tribunal, Lawrence Bayode, INEC deputy director, said out of the five documents sought by the petitioners, two were non-existent, while one was being processed

Also, Moronkeji Tairu, a deputy director of INEC, tendered some other documents requested by the petitioners.

She also said some of the documents requested do not exist while others need to be gathered from across the 36 states.

“The others are to be gotten across the states and for logistics reasons it would take a while before we can get them,” she said.

PDP TO CLOSE CASE

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and its presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, have indicated that they would close their case on Friday.

Although they were supposed to conclude on Tuesday, the tribunal granted an extension till Friday after a plea by Chris Uche, the petitioners’ counsel.

Meanwhile, all the petitioners are expected to close their cases by the end of the week.

TINUBU TO OPEN CASE JULY 1

According to the pre-hearing schedule, the respondents will commence their cases on June 31.

The electoral commission will call its witnesses on June 31 while Tinubu, Vice-President Kashim Shettima and the All Progressives Congress (APC) have between July 1 and July 6 to tender their evidence.