Atiku Abubakar, the Peoples Democratic Party’s (PDP) nominee for president, and his party will conclude their argument in the joint petition contesting Bola Tinubu’s designation as the winner of the February 25 presidential election on Thursday.
A pre-hearing report stated that the petitioners were scheduled to conclude their case on Tuesday. However, Chief Chris Uche, their principal attorney, informed the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC) that they had missed two of the days allowed to them and requested that the days be taken into account.
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Only 25 of the 100 witnesses that the petitioners promised the court they would call during the pre-hearing session were actually called.
Uche told reporters that they might call five more witnesses, rounding off the case.
The attorney said that some of the materials to be presented over the next two days would compensate for the absence of the final 70 witnesses.
On Thursday, our case will be concluded. The case was intended to be over today (Tuesday), but the court graciously extended our time by two days because we lost two days, one of which was the public holiday on June 12.
The petitioners complained earlier in the proceedings about the challenges they faced obtaining Certified True Copies (CTC) of documents from the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to support their case.
The attorney for Atiku and his party told the court at the petition’s resumed hearing that receiving materials from INEC was comparable to receiving weapons from an adversary. But he did congratulate the electoral body’s legal team, led by Abubakar Mahmoud, for helping to obtain some of the documents from INEC.
Uche requested that the proceedings be stopped so that the petitioners may mark the vast amount of material that had been made accessible to them yesterday.
In the meantime, Kemi Pinheiro, the attorney for INEC, informed the court in his comments that INEC personnel brought the documents from all across the nation and that the petitioners had not yet paid for the documents’ certification.
He stated that it was the petitioners’ responsibility to create a schedule of the documents they wished to submit.
To give the petitioners time to gather their thoughts and decide what to do with the documents, the court stood for roughly ten minutes.
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When Uche informed the court that the parties had concurred that the petitioners should return with the documents, create a schedule of documents, and mark the documents for tomorrow’s tender when they returned.
The five-judge panel, presided over by Justice Haruna Tsammani, deferred the case till today.
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Was never a serious candidate.