Atiku witnesses claim election fraud

Abiye Sekibo, the Peoples Democratic Party’s coordinator for the presidential election in Rivers State, claimed on Monday that the Electoral Act of 2022’s rules on the use of electronic transmission of results had been broken.

Sekibo testified in support of the PDP’s case challenging Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress as the winner of the February 25 presidential election at the Presidential Election case Court in Abuja.

During cross-examination by Tinubu’s attorney, Akin Olujimi (SAN), the witness admitted to the court that the Bimodal Voters Accreditation System had not recorded the results from polling places throughout Rivers State.

He said, “All the polling units I went to, they could not upload the results.”

However, he acknowledged that Atiku Abubakar, the PDP’s presidential nominee, did not receive up to 25% of the vote in the Federal Capital Territory.

Additionally, Ibrahim Hamza, the PDP’s collation officer for Nassarawa State, said that the state had engaged in electoral fraud.

Hamza said in court that he was forced to sign the presidential election results.

He said, “Due process was not followed…I had to sign to obtain a copy of the results because there was this intimidation that if I did not sign, I would not be given the result. I signed it under duress.”

The Labour Party and Peter Obi, their candidate, also filed a petition to challenge Tinubu’s victory, and the court accepted the last set of results from several local government areas as evidence.

The final batch of the EC8A series of documents presented by the LP and Obi before the court consisted of those records that were admitted from the local government regions of eight states.

Ebonyi, Nassarawa, Delta, Kaduna, Imo, Ondo, Kogi, and Sokoto are the states from which the exhibits were sourced.

The five-member PEPC panel led by Justice Haruna Tsammani accepted the bundle of documents from all eight states offered despite opposition from the legal teams for the APC and Tinubu. They then designated them as exhibits in the suit by Obi and LP.

The court then postponed further discussion of the petitions until today, Tuesday.