INEC chair meets Obi’s legal team, assures on documents

The legal team of the presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP) Peter Obi on Monday visited the headquarters of the Independent National Electoral Commission(INEC) to inspect materials used for the February 25 presidential election.

The legal team was led by Dr Livy Uzoukwu to INEC headquarters and received by the Chairman of INEC, Prof Mahmood Yakubu.

Yakubu assured the legal team that the commission would make materials for the election available to anybody.

The INEC Chairman said the commission has nothing to hide with regard to the conduct of the February 25 presidential election where the candidate of the All Progressives Congress, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu was declared winner.

He said: “I want to assure you that the commission will not hide any document from anybody and will make available any document that they have requested.

“There are two categories of documents: those that are in possession of the headquarters of INEC will easily make these documents available to you. Specifically the EC8Ds from the States and the ECD A, which is the collation at the national collection centre by the commission itself. The EC8E, the declaration, a total of I think 39 documents, this we can easily certify and give you almost immediately.

“As for other documents that we are asking for they are at state level, so we need to work out the schedule so that we know when your team is going to which state and on which date so that we can easily facilitate not just certification of documents, but also the inspection that you requested for each of these documents.

“The other one is accreditation data from the back end. This will also be made available to you. Remember that the accreditation data covers over 176,000 polling units. We have to print them physically and certify them and give them to you so the tall and short of what I’m saying is that you will get this document speedily.

“We will also make arrangements and notify our Resident Electoral Commissioners of your intended visit so that these documents will be made available to you those that are at the level, including access to the inspection of any category of materials.

“I crave your indulgence to suggest that let your team interface with the legal team of the commission immediately. So you work these things out and then we make all the documents available to you. But please be assured, the Lead Counsel that INEC has nothing to hide. Whatever you’re asking for will be made available to you.”

Uzoukwu said the legal team visited the commission because it had not received any of the documents from INEC.

He said his clients were very worried over the delay in releasing the documents to the legal team for inspection.

He said: “We are here because we have not received any electoral stocks for inspection on behalf of our client, and as you all know, the election petition is time sensitive. We have 21 days to file a petition on behalf of our client. Out of those 21 days we probably have about 10 days to go and up till now we have not received any documents.

“We have written to INEC requesting documents apart from that, the Court of Appeal made an order on March 3, ordering INEC to release those documents to us but we haven’t received any, hence we requested for a meeting with the chairman of the commission.

“He graciously granted that audience within a very short notice, and he (Yakubu) has given us assurance, concrete assurance on record that all documents we require will be made available and if possible, some of them will be made available to us today.

“So we believe that that will happen and we are leaving here rest assured that by the time we leave INEC premises at least, we will leave with some documents, the rest can then come from tomorrow and so on and so forth.

“We are very much bothered and I made that point when we met with the chairman that not only that our client is bothered and agitated but also we members of the legal council are bothered, members of Labour Party are bothered, their supporters are bothered and restive.

“In fact, it has taken a lot to calm them down to exercise patients that we are going to get the documents because the court of the land has ordered the documents to be given to us.

“Well, some documents will come from the state level but we do not think it will take an eternity for those documents to come. Meanwhile, there are those that are domiciled here at the headquarters. Those ones we can go away with today. Not making the documents available will create the impression that INEC is deliberately frustrating us. That’s just the impression it will create to make sure that we cannot prosecute this petition. But listening to the chairman a short while ago and all assurances I want to give him or we want to give him the benefit of the doubt that we will get some of them today.

“At least if we get some of them today that is indicative that we’ll get some other documents from tomorrow, next tomorrow to enable us to file this petition. Having said that, the way and manner the chairman spoke. I’m confident that he will keep to his word. You know, because he says so.”