TINUBU: Atiku Asks For Adjournment Over Disorderly Documents At Tribunal

…We Paid N6m To INEC But Yet To Get What We Requested, PDP Tells Panel

On Tuesday, the Presidential Election Petitions Court sitting in Abuja criticized the manner in which the People’s Democratic Party and its presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, sought to tender more certified true copies of electoral documents before it.

The court was not happy with the PDP’s arrangement of several INEC Forms EC8E.

This forced the PDP lawyer, Eyitayo Jegede SAN, to ask for an adjournment to Wednesday.

INEC Form EC8E is the last electoral document used for the declaration of the final result.

Atiku, who is challenging the outcome of the 2023 presidential election, has so far called 9 witnesses and tendered several electoral documents including the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) machine report for the 36 states, including the FCT.

At the resumption of the proceedings, Jegede announced he wants to tender Form EC8Es starting with Kogi state (10 LGAs).

But the five-man panel of judges led by Justice Haruna Tsammani observed that his scheduled list of documents was not arranged serially according to LGAs.

The court noticed that while Jegede sought to tender documents for 10 LGAs in Kogi state, as evidence, his schedule showed 21 LGAs.

When the PDP lawyer’s attention was drawn to it, he admitted that he had to put all the documents requested from INEC in his list before the court, adding that those he was able to get from the electoral umpire was the ones he sought to tender today.

But Tinubu’s lawyer, Wole Olanipekun SAN asked the PDP to consider making a comprehensive list of documents, so that both the lawyers and judges won’t have issues analysing the documents at their respective chambers.

Jegede explained that his tendering of documents was based on what was made available to him by INEC.

He said he had issued subpoena against INEC and had already paid over N6 million for it.

“We are having difficulty in numbering your documents,” the panel told Jegede.

It advised him to take a break, rearrange his list properly and highlight only the documents he has.

Subsequently, the PDP counsel asked for an adjournment to Wednesday, to enable him “have a more comprehensive schedule together with the documents we are expecting from INEC.”

The application for adjournment was then granted by the court.