Appeal court grants Atiku, Obi request to check election materials

Peter Obi and Atiku Abubakar

Presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP), Peter Obi, has received the court of appeal’s go-ahead to check all the sensitive materials used by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in the conduct of the election held on February 25.

The court also granted the same order to presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku Abubakar.

A panel of the appellate court led by Joseph Ikyegh made the orders on Friday after the court heard two separate ex parte applications filed by the two aggrieved candidates and their political parties.

Chairman of INEC, Mahmood Yakubu, on Wednesday announced Bola Tinubu, candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), as the winner of the election with 8,794,726 votes.

Atiku had 6,984,520 votes while Obi polled 6,101,533 votes.

The opposition candidates rejected the verdict of INEC and vowed to challenge the result in court.

In his ex parte application marked: CA/PEC/02M/23, Obi through his team of lawyers led by Alex Ejesieme, sought six principal reliefs.

Atiku, in his application filed through his lawyer, Adedamola Faloku, sought seven reliefs from the court.

The applicants asked the court to compel INEC to allow them to obtain documents in its custody that were used for the presidential election.

They submitted that the records would support their petition challenging Tinubu’s victory.

They also obtained an order granting them leave to file the application, outside or before the pre-hearing session of the substantive petitions.
INEC, Tinubu, and the APC are the respondents in the suit.