10 thorny issues Nigeria’s Court of Appeal has to grapple with when it hears the appeals against last Inec declaring Tinubu president-elect 

Ayo Akinfe 

[1] First of all, both the Peoples Democratic Party and the Labour Party are claiming victory. This means that at the very least, one of the appeals will have to be dismissed 

[2] Now, the court will have to look at hard evidence. All these claims being made on social media are not admissible in a court of law, so the appellants will have to provide evidence of result falsification or tampering with tallying 

[3] What the court will want to see is proof that results were falsified to the extent that they altered the outcome of the election

[4] Now, as we all know, wherever ballot box tampering takes place, Inec cancels the results and this happened in at least one polling unit in every state last Saturday. Any appeal will have to show evidence of further such cases not being detected 

[5] Now, the thorny issue of Inec’s online services ala its Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) and the Inec Results Viewing (IRev) portal are what are likely to be centre stage here

[6] Inec assured Nigerians that results from the polling units, copies of which were issued to political parties, are safe on both the BVAS and the IReV portal. It added that these results cannot be tampered with and any discrepancy between them and the physical results used in collation will be thoroughly investigated and remediated, in line with Section 65 of the Electoral Act 202

[7] Now, both the PDP and Labour Party have a major gripe in that election results were not uploaded onto Inec’s IReV from the polling units immediately. They are subsequently saying that as a consequence, the election results should be immediately invalidated and declared null and void 

[8] What the court will have to decide is does not transmitting results electronically on time as called for under the Electoral Act make them invalid, even if they have not been tampered with or altered

[9] Basically, the litigants will have to provide evidence showing widespread discrepancies between the figures counted at the polling units and those published by Inec 

[10] If the litigants can provide sufficient evidence of vote alteration, I guess the court can order fresh elections. Will this mean the senate president office as Nigeria’s helmsman while the process plays out? We are in for a turbulent few months. I just hope we can keep ethnicity out of the process and allow it remain a legal matter