Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, has assured Political Parties seeking to challenge the outcome of the just concluded 2023 Presidential election in court that the Commission is willing to cooperate by making available all necessary documents requested by the parties.
Prof. Yakubu who asserted that the Commission has nothing to hide, gave the assurance when the Legal team of the Labour Party (LP) led by Dr. Levy Uzoukwu, visited the INEC headquarters in Abuja on Monday.
Addressing the LP Legal team, the INEC Chairman 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 for. There are two categories of documents those that are in possession of the headquarters of INEC, we will easily make these documents available to you”.
“Specifically, the Form EC8Ds from the states and the EC8DA, which is the collation at the National Collection Centre by the Commission itself. The EC8E, the declaration, so many, a total of, I think 39 documents, this we can easily certify and give you almost immediately.”
He added that; “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 INEC Chairman also spoke on the Legal teams’ request for the accreditation data for the Presidential election. He said “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 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.”
“They 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 state level, including access to inspection of any category of materials.”
He added that; “a meeting has been scheduled with all the Resident Electoral Commissioners it is going to be a virtual meeting at 3pm, today, (Monday) which we will discuss among other issues, this matter of providing CTCs not only to the Labour Party, but to all other litigants as well.”
Explaining the purpose of their visit to Journalists after the meeting, the leader of the team and also Lead Counsel to the Labour Party, Dr. Livy Uzoukwu (SAN), said that it was a follow up to their written request and the order by the Court of Appeal issued on the 3rd of March 2023.
He said: “we are here because we have not received any electoral stocks for inspection on behalf of our clients, and as you all know, election petition is time sensitive. We have 21 days to file a petition on behalf of our clients. Out of that 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 for documents apart from that, the Court of Appeal made an order on the March 3, to 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.”
Dr. Uzoukwu explained further that the Prof. Yakubu graciously granted them audience within a very short notice, “and he 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.’, he added.
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