The Court of Appeal in Abuja has scheduled a hearing on Wednesday to assess the merits of the Independent National Electoral Commission’s appeal to reconfigure the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, which was utilized in the recently ended presidential election.
Following hearing from the parties, the court’s three-member panel deferred decision on the matter until Wednesday.
Obi and LP, through their legal team lead by Onyechi Ikpeazu, SAN, stated that the application’s purpose was to enable them to extract data contained in BVAS “that represent the real results from Polling Units.”
They also applied for the Certified True Copy of all data in the BVAS.
“My lords, this is to ensure that the material is retained before INEC reconfigures the BVAS. This is because if they are wiped away, the substance of the case would harm,” Ikpeazu, SAN, noted.
Nevertheless, INEC, via a team of lawyers led by Mr Tanimu Inuwa and comprised of four Senior Advocates of Nigeria, SAN, requested the court to deny the plea.
INEC insisted that granting Obi and LP’s plea would jeopardize its preparations for the impending governorship and state assembly elections.
He told the judge that around 176, 000 BVAS were deployed to polling units during the presidential election.
“Each polling unit has its own BVAS machine, we’ll need to configure for the next elections.
“It will be quite difficult for us to reconfigure the 176, 000 BVAS within the time frame.
“We have already declared in our affidavit that no information in the BVAS will be lost since all data in the BVAS will be transferred to our backend server.”
“The BVAS must be configured. Thus, allowing this motion will constitute a stumbling block in the process and may cause the elections to be delayed,” INEC’s lawyer, Inuwa, SAN, pleaded.
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