Nigeria’s presidential election petition tribunal sitting in Abuja, has fixed Friday May 19, 2023 for the continuation of pre-hearing petition filed by the presidential candidate of Labour Party against the president elect, Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
At the resumed hearing, counsel for Labour Party, Lebi Uzoukwu informed the court that the scheduled meeting to agree on documents to be tendered for hearing hasn’t yielded much results as the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has only made available 30% of the documents required from them.
He added that this is contrary to commitment by the INEC Chairman, Mahmoud Yakubu, that all documents required shall be made available.
He further added that the party is yet to get documents with respect to Rivers State where he said the Resident Electoral Commissioner said there are no forms EC8A available to be given but is yet to put that in writing despite request to do so.
But Counsel for INEC, Abubakar Mahmoud, however, said he is surprised by the allegations of the counsel for the Labour party as they they did not show up for the meeting as agreed, and walked out of the rescheduled meeting.
Abubakar added that the documents for Rivers and Sokoto states, where indeed provided, but the Labour Party refused to pay the sum of 1.5million naira for Sokoto State, and the Form EC8A for Rivers State, have not been given to them.
He added that some documents were given to the party, but refused to collect it until it was complete.
