Nigeria’s Election Commission agreed on Tuesday to hand over documents related to last month’s disputed election to the opposition legal team.
Nigeria’s electoral body pledged to release 7,778 documents to Labor Party lawyers to pursue the case against the presidential election result, local TV station Arise TV reported.
The decision followed a meeting between the chairman of the Nigerian Independent National Election Commission (INEC), Mahmood Yakubu, and lawyers from the Labor Party.
“INEC has nothing to hide. Documents available at headquarters will be given immediately,” Yakubu said on Wednesday.
“We are meeting with Resident Electoral Commissioners today and we will discuss how other state-level documents can also be made available to you promptly,” he added.
INEC Chair, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu today assured the Labor Party’s legal team that the Commission will provide all the documents it has requested to pursue its case.
He said: “INEC has nothing to hide. Documents available at headquarters are provided immediately. We are pic.twitter.com/KpclUtyprQ
— INEC Nigeria (@inecnigeria) March 13, 2023
The day before the announcement, defeated opposition candidate Peter Obi confirmed that he would challenge INEC’s election process, which declared Bola Tinubu the winner of the February 23 race.
Further to my answer to a question when I appeared on Arise TV earlier today, I would like to state categorically that I am challenging the INEC election process in the Presidential Elections Tribunal (PET) that led to Tinubu’s declaration as president-elect as well as the
— Peter Obi (@PeterObi) March 13, 2023
Little chance
Attempts by defeated opposition parties to overturn election results in Nigeria by challenging them in court have never been successful.
Opposition lawyers are likely to base their case on Section 50(2) of Nigerian Electoral Act of 2022stating that results must be sent electronically, following a procedure established by the committee.
“The Labor Party and PDP (Peoples Democratic Party) hope to prove that INEC has breached election law by not communicating results electronically,” said Harry Burns, an election strategist working in the UK and Africa.
“They hope that this, coupled with the obvious irregularities at many polling places (where numbers are changed manually), will prove that the election results cannot be trusted and that they should be redone.”
Opposition lawyers are also hoping to find evidence that voting machines — the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) — have been tampered with — though there doesn’t seem to be any evidence yet, Burns says.
“There is a good chance that the APC (All Progressives Congress) will be declared victorious and Tinubu will become president, but whatever happens, the Labor Party seems to be here to stay and change could be just around the corner.”
Last week, Nigeria’s Election Commission postponed gubernatorial elections to March 18 because it needed more time to reconfigure the electronic machines used in last month’s elections.
