By Uche Mbah
The Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, and it’s flag bearer, Atiku Abubakar, appear confident of victory due to the formidable nature of evidence available to them to pursue their case. Already, they have been able to retrieve from the Independent National Electoral Commission the actual result saved there before their internet server went down. This was for the thirty five states of federation and Abuja. The result for Rivers state was not available before the server went down.
According to the result from INEC Server, Atiku defeated Mohammed Buhari. Excluding Rivers Result, PDP polled 18,356,732 votes as against the All Progressives Congress polled 16,741,430. Atiku, by that result, won by 1,615,302 votes.
INEC has announced PDP 11,262,978 and APC 15,191,847, giving the APC victory.
Trends in the governorship elections tends to confirm PDP’s lead in popularity.
Atiku had gone to court asking to be declared the winner of the election-or, in the alternative, for the election to be cancelled and a rerun ordered.
Besides that, atiku have also asked the court to declare that President Buhari is not qualified to contest for the election in the first place, because he had not produced his West African School certificate or it’s equivalent.
It will be recalled that in 2015, a legal practitioner, Chukwunweike Okafor, dragged candidate Buhari to court over his qualification to contest the elections. He had deposited through his counsel, Ugo Ugonnadi, that his form CF001 deposited with INEC where he stated that he obtained the West African School Certificate was false, since the certificate was either forged or non existent.But when Buhari won the elections, the case was dropped, with allegations of intimidation by security agencies rife.
But Atiku’s lead counsel, Livy Uzoukwu, has expressed confidence that at the end of the Trial, Atiku will be singing a victory song.
“I believe we have sufficient facts to move the court to appreciate our case and grant us our reliefs”, he said. “We are ready and prepared to prove our case because it all depends on proofs and we are ready to prove our case. We have filed the petition, which is most fundamental, with some documents.”
According to him, INEC has not been helpful in allowing them access to electoral materials.
“That we have filed petition does not mean we cannot make use of those documents when we eventually secure them from INEC. Some members of the team were in INEC three times last week, they were in INEC yesterday and even today but they asked them to come tomorrow (Tuesday), that by tomorrow they will provide them with some documents. I do hope that INEC will keep to its words and do the needful, because they have no option as far as the matter is concerned. Because we are talking about the compliance with an order of the court”, he added.
