Atiku withdraws his suit asking that he be allowed to observe BVAS reconfiguration exercise

FOMRER vice president Alhaji Atiku Abubakar has withdrawn his legal application asking that the law courts grant him permission to observe the reconfiguration of Independent National Electoral Commission's (Inec) Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) machines.

 

On Saturday February 25, Nigerians went to the polls to elect a new president and Inec subsequently declared Asiwaju Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC), the winner. Among the main gladiators in the contest were Asiwaju Tinubu of APC, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), ex-Anambra State governor Peter Obi of the Labour Party and former Kano State governor Senator Rabiu Kwankwaso of the New Nigerian Peoples Party (NNPP).

 

Inec chairman Professor Mahmood Yakubu, who served as the returning officer for the presidential election, declared Asiwaju Tinubu the victor of the contest with 8,794,726 votes, defeating Alhaji Abubakar of the PDP, who came second with 6,984,520 votes. However, the PDP and Labour Party have refused to accept the results, taking to the courts to challenge the APCs victory.

 

This weekend, Inec will be conducting gubernatorial and state houses of assembly elections and is reconfiguring its BVAS machines as part of moves to improves the process. As the legal wrangling got underway, the PDP had originally asked to be allowed to observe the reconfiguration.

 

On March 8, Nigeria's Court of Appeal in Abuja, had granted Inec the right to go ahead with the reconfiguration of the BVAS used in the conduct of the February 25 presidential elections. Led by Justice Joseph Ikyegh, the court allowed the configuration following convictions that the BVAS information on the presidential polls can be safely stored in an accredited backend server.

 

Inec had approached the court to vary its earlier order permitting Alhaji Abubakar and Peter Obi, to inspect election materials including the BVAS machines used for the conduct of the presidential election. They had anchored the request on the grounds that the same BVAS machines used for the presidential polls are the ones to be used in the governorship and state houses of assembly election.

 

Shortly after the permission was granted, Inec announced a shift of the governorship and state houses of assembly polls to March 18 from March 11, a reconfiguration would take time. Meanwhile, Alhaji Abubakar and his party, the PDP, had requested permission to observe the reconfiguration of the BVAS machines by Inec officials.

 

However, when the matter was called yesterday, Ifeanyi Iboko, a lawyer who represented Alhaji Abubakar and the PDP, drew the appellate court’s attention to a notice of discontinuance filed in respect of the two cases. He explained that the discontinuation was predicated on facts that the two motions have been rendered obsolete by recent events.

 

Following the withdrawal and non-opposition by the respondents, the appellate court subsequently dismissed the two motions. According to Inec, for it to deploy the BVAS used for the presidential election for the March 11 polls, it must first have to reconfigure the machines, which entails purging the accreditation data in the BVAS, adding that before the reconfiguration, all information on the BVAS would have been uploaded to its accreditation back-end server for safe keeping.

 

 

Share