By Enyichukwu Enemanna
The Court of Appeal sitting in Abuja will today, March 8 consider the merit of the application the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) seeking permission to reconfigure the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) used in conducting the Feb. 25 presidential and National Assembly elections.
The electoral umpire had claimed that the reconfiguration of the BVAS is critical especially as it holds governorship and state assembly elections in 28 states of the country on Saturday.
Arising from the fall out of the presidential election, opposition Labour Party and the PDP had applied to physically inspect the materials used in conducting the election that produced APC’s Bola Tinubu as winner, including the BVAS.
They alleged manipulations and have since rejected the result declared by the INEC.
Labour Party and its presidential candidate, Peter Obi through their team of lawyers led by Dr Onyechi Ikpeazu, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria on Tuesday told the court that the essence of the application was to enable them to extract data embedded in the BVAS, “which represent the actual results from Polling Units”.
They equally applied to obtain the Certified True Copy, CTC, of all the data in the BVAS.
However, INEC, through its team of lawyers comprising of four Senior Advocates of Nigeria, SAN, led by Mr Tanimu Inuwa, urged the court to refuse the application.
INEC insisted that granting the request by Obi and LP would affect its preparations for the upcoming Governorship and state assembly elections.
The commission told the court that there are about 176, 000 BVAS that were deployed to polling units during the presidential election.
“Each polling unit has its own particular BVAS machine which we need to configure for the forthcoming elections.
“It will be very difficult for us, within the period, to reconfigure the 176, 000 BVAS.
“We have already stated in our affidavit that no information in the BVAS will be lost as we will transfer all the data in the BVAS to our backend server
“We need the BVAS configured. So, granting this application will be a clog in the process and may delay the conduct of the elections”, INEC’s lawyer, Inuwa (SAN), pleaded.
After it had listened to the parties, the three-member panel of the Appeal Court led by Justice Joseph Ikyegh adjourned to rule on the application on Wednesday.
