Admin l Thursday, June 22, 2023
ABUJA, Nigeria – The Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC was once more on the hot seat at the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal, PEPT sitting at the Court of Appeal in Abuja, where a witness told the tribunal that the election umpire deliberately deleted results of the Presidential Election held February 25, 2022 from Bimodal Voters Accreditation System, BVAS deployed for the election.
Mr. Hitler Nwala, a digital forensic expert made the revelation while testifying at PEPT. INEC had in obtaining permission from PEPT to wipe off data from BVAS to conduct the governorship election assured that the information would be transferred to a central server which will be made accessible to interested parties.
About 176,000 BVAS were deployed for the election. In seeking permission of the three man PEPT, Tanimu Inuwa, counsel to INEC assured the panel as follows:
“We have stated in our affidavit that no information in the BVAS will be lost as we will transfer all the data in the BVAS to our backend server. Our backend server preserves the data”, he said.
But Nwala who was testifying in the case of Atiku Abubakar, challenging the election of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu at PEPT told the 5-member panel that INEC, wiped off results of the presidential election results in FCT even when there was no governorship and house of assembly election.
Atiku and his party had insisted that data from the BVAS machines which were used for the accreditation of voters and uploading of polling unit results, would establish their allegation and that the presidential election was rigged in Tinubu’s favour.
Led in evidence by Chief Chris Uche, SAN, Mr. Nwala told the court that he specifically inspected and conducted forensic analysis on 110 BVAS that were deployed for the conduct of the presidential election in the Federal Capital Territory, FCT, Abuja.
According to him, upon his enquiry, the electoral body maintained that it had to wipe off the information in the BVAS to be able to redeploy them for the Governorship and State Houses of Assembly elections that held on March 18.
Counsel to INEC, Mr. Abubakar Mahmoud, SAN, faulted report of the witness, stressing that 110 BVAS devices used for the election, was not sufficient to establish that there was any irregularity on the part of the Commission, specifically he said the sample upon which the witness based his report was small, compared to 3, 263 BVAS devices, deployed for the election in the FCT.
According to him, the sample size represented only about 3.5 percent of the total device the INEC deployed in FCT and 0.06 percent of the total BVAS that was used for the presidential election, across the country.
