Chairman, Independent National Electoral Commission, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, has confidently told the legal team of the Labour Party that the Commission is ready to provide all documents the party requested to prosecute its case at the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal, stressing that it has nothing to hide.
Yakubu gave the assurance on Monday when he received the team of 60 lawyers led by Livy Uzoukwu.
In his address to the legal team, Yakubu said the Commission would also meet with its Resident Electoral Commissioners, RECs, in the states to work out modalities for the inspection of materials in the states.
“INEC has nothing to hide. Documents available at the headquarters will be given immediately.
“We are meeting with Resident Electoral Commissioners today and we will discuss how other documents at the state level could also be made available to you speedily,” he stated.
The Labour Party’s legal team was at the INEC headquarters to fine tune the processes through which it could obtain all relevant documents for the prosecution of its case.
The party had earlier obtained a court judgment directing the electoral umpire to allow it inspect the materials used for the February 25 polls.
Also, the Presidential Election Petition Court, PEPC, sitting at the Court of Appeal in Abuja, last Wednesday, gave INEC the nod to reconfigure the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, BVAS, it used for the presidential election.
The court, in a unanimous decision by a three-member panel of justices, held that stopping the electoral body from reconfiguring the BVAS would adversely affect Saturday’s governorship and state assemblies elections.
It dismissed objections which the LP and its presidential candidate, Peter Obi, raised against INEC’s move to reconfigure all the BVAS.
According to the court, allowing the objections by Obi and his party would amount to “tying the hands of the respondent, INEC.”
It also noted that INEC had in an affidavit it filed before the court, assured that the accreditation data contained in the BVAS could not be tampered with or lost, as they would be stored and easily retrieved from its accredited back-end server.
