By Ishaya Ibrahim
Presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku Abubakar, has fired a 223-page petition to the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal detailing how he was allegedly denied victory in the February 25 poll.
The petition detailed several alleged infractions, including manipulation of the Bimodal Voters Accreditation System (BVAS), over-bloated votes for the All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential candidate, Bola Tinubu, and other breaches.
The petition, to be argued by 40 senior lawyers led by Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), Joe Kyari Gadzama on behalf of Atiku, claimed that a critical software in the BVAS, the Voters Accreditation System, was designed and configured in-house by Chidi Nwafor, who headed the ICT team of INEC. But some months before the presidential election, Nwafor was transferred out of the ICT department of INEC in Abuja to become ‘Administrative Secretary’ in Enugu.
Atiku further alleged that INEC then brought in an ICT consultant, a man called Suleiman Farouk, who then introduced a technology in the BVAS.
READ ALSO
Atiku accuses Yakubu of rigging election for Tinubu to undermine democracy
He said it is that technology, which is the Device Management System, that allowed the results of the presidential election to be quarantined long enough for agents of Tinubu to change and input the wrong results.
He said: “The DMS is a software that allows INEC’s IT Security Consultant, Suleiman Farouk, to remotely control, monitor, and filter data that is transmitted from the BVAS to the electronic collation system and the IRev platform. Meanwhile, the 1st Respondent (INEC) engaged an appointee of the 2nd Respondent (Tinubu) to man and oversee the sensitive ICT department of the 1st Respondent (INEC) for the purpose of the election.”
Atiku said this was the reason results of the presidential election were not transmitted in real-time, and that by March 1, not up to 50 per cent of those results have been transmitted to the IRev.
Atiku said this paved the way for the manipulation of the results.
He countered the argument of INEC that the reason the results were not uploaded in real-time on election day was because of a glitch. He said he would bring expert witnesses during the trial to show that there was no glitch on the day of the presidential election.
Read the full petition
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AojO4GoyUbkZq7pZ1IMNDVdnNobIC2sR/view