Tribunal Orders Tinubu To Defend His Presidential Victory As INEC Concludes Testimony With ICT Director

The Presidential Election Petitions Court sitting in Abuja has ordered the legal team of President Bola Tinubu to open its defence against the petition filed by the presidential candidate of the People’s Democratic party, Atiku Abubakar, which alleged Tinubu was rigged into power in connivance with the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC.

The order came on Monday after the legal team of INEC, led by A.B. Mahmoud SAN, closed its defence of the election victory of Tinubu with one witness.

Dr. Lawrence Bayode, Deputy Director in the ICT Department of the electoral umpire, announced appearance as INEC’s sole witness.

In Bayode’s witness statement on oath seen by THE WHISTLER, he said during the February 25 presidential and national assembly elections, INEC technical team took every step to restore the (IREV) application to functionality including creating and deploying patches and updates to resolve the glitches that allegedly prevented the BVAS machines used for the election from uploading results in real-time from polling units.

He argued that the downtime encountered on the IREV application lasted for 4 hours and 50 minutes until it was resolved and the first presidential result was “successfully” uploaded at 8:55 pm on the 25th of February, 2023.

“The investigation by the INEC experts shows that the system was returning error codes specifically HTTP 500 error.

“HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) 500 error is a coding message which indicates that a computer or server has encountered an unexpected error that has prevented it from carrying out or fulfilling a specific request or executing a command,” he said in his witness statement.

Under cross-examination by Tinubu’s lawyer, Wole Olanipekun SAN, and the All Progressives Congress’s counsel, Lateef Fagbemi, Bayode maintained that the glitches encountered on election day did not affect the results declared by the INEC chairman, Yakubu Mahmood.

But during cross examination by Atiku’s lead counsel, Chris Uche SAN, Bayode said the electoral umpire failed to inform the Amazon Web Services, AWS, about the glitches that occurred on the INEC Results Viewing Portal, IRev.

AWS is the cloud platform that INEC engaged to host the IREV and secure the electoral information.

Furthermore, Uche asked Bayode to read in open court the European Union Observer Mission final report which stated that INEC damaged its public trust in the conduct of the 2023 election due to lack of transparency and failure to upload polling unit results to IREV in real-time.

The witness did and Uche subsequently tendered it as part of Atiku’s evidence.

The PEPC admitted the documents despite objections from the respondents.

The five-man panel of the court led by Justice Haruna Tsammani adjourned till Tuesday for Tinubu’s team to commence its defence.