The Court of Appeal in Abuja on Tuesday fixed March 8 for the ruling in an application by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) seeking to vary the court’s order for the inspection of materials used for the conduct of the February 25 presidential election.
The order to inspect the election materials was granted to the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, and the Labour Party, LP, as part of the conditions for filing petitions to challenge alleged malpractices in the conduct of the February 25 presidential election.
Justice Joseph Ikyegh, who led a three-member panel of the Court of Appeal, announced the date for ruling after lawyers representing parties in the suit adopted and argued their briefs of argument for and against the motion.
INEC had on March 4 approached the appellate court for an order giving it leave to reconfigure the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) used for the presidential and parliamentary elections.
The electoral umpire explained that the reconfiguration is to enable it to deploy the BVAS for the forthcoming governorship and state houses of assembly polls.
INEC, through its lawyer, Mr Inuwa Tanimu, SAN, in urging the court to grant its request told the court that the defendants have nothing to fear since the information that would be wiped out during reconfiguration would be stored and saved in its server in the cloud.
Tanimu, who noted that time is not on the electoral umpire’s side pointed out that if the earlier order is not varied, it may affect the conduct of the March 11 governorship election.
However, in their opposition to the granting of the varying order, Chief Onyechi Ikpeazu and Chief Emeka Etiaba, both Senior Advocates of Nigeria, representing Peter Obi and Atiku Abubakar respectively, argued that if the order is varied, vital information needed in proving their case would be wiped out.
According to Ikpeazu, the real figure of accredited voters can only be gotten from the BVAS, adding that if the BVAS is tampered with in the name of reconfiguration, vital information would be lost.