Atiku loses major battle as election tribunal refuses him permission to inspect disputed Inec server

FORMER vice president Alhaji Atiku Abubakar has suffered a major setback in his bid to overturn the results of February's presidential polls after the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal (PEPT) rejected his request to inspect the electoral servers.

On February 23, Nigerians went to the polls and after the votes were counted, the Independent National Electoral Commission (Inec), declared incumbent President Muhammadu Buhari of the All progressives Congress (APC), the winner. According to Inec, President Buhari scored 15,191,847 votes to 11,262,978 for Alhaji Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

However, Alhaji Abubakar has refused to accept the results, claiming that the figures were doctored after they were sent to Inec. According to Alhaji Abubakar, the original and authentic results were altered after they were entered into Inec's server and he plans to call on IT experts from Microsoft, IBM and Oracle as witnesses to prove his case.

Today, however, the PEPT rejected a request by PDP for permission to inspect a supposed central server, which they claimed Inec used to transmit results electronically. In a unanimous ruling, the five-man tribunal panel led by Justice Mohammed Garba, dismissed the application, pointing out that granting the petitioners’ request to inspect a server, which Inec said did not exist, will amount to the tribunal agreeing that a server actually exists.

According to the tribunal, since parties to the petition by Atiku and PDP were disputing the existence or otherwise of an Inec central server, it was wrong for it to grant the petitioners’ request to inspect a server, whose existence, usage or otherwise was being disputed by parties. It noted that by averments contained in processes filed by parties, they have joined issues on whether or not there is a central server and whether or not Inec deployed it for the election.

It said the issue about the existence of a server, which forms a substantial part of the petition filed by Alhaji Abubakar and the PDP, should be determined at the hearing of the main petition. Inec has consistently denied that it deployed any server for the transmission of the election results and that the extant Electoral Act and electoral guidelines do not allow electronic transmission of election results.