As stated in part two, Peter Obi called a witness to contradict INEC’s claim that technical glitches prevented its uploading of presidential results in real time
from the polling units on February 25, 2023. Giving evidence on Monday, June 19, 2023, Mrs. Mpeh Clarita Ogar, a cloud engineer and architect at Amazon Web Services Incorporated told the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal that a report of the health status
of the Amazon Web Services which hosts INEC IReV portal showed that there were no technical glitches on 25 February 2023. Asked under cross-examination if the company,
Amazon Web Services Incorporated had sent her to testify in the court, Mrs Mpeh Clarita Ogar responded, “The subpoena was not delivered to Amazon but to me. Am here as an expert witness, am not here on the mandate of Amazon.” Was
the report presented by Mrs. Ogar to the PEPT prepared by her or her employer,
‘Amazon Web Services Incorporated Nigeria?’ Mrs Ogar replied that she was in the court in her personal capacity to give evidence in the petition filed by Peter Gregory Obi and his Labour Party against the declaration of Tinubu as winner of the February 25,
2023 presidential poll. Questioned by Tinubu’s counsel, Wole Olanipekun, Mrs. Ogar who described herself as a Cloud Engineer and Architect at the Amazon Web Services Incorporated, Nigeria, admitted to being a member of the Labour Party, on which platform she
contested the House of Representatives seat in Yala Ogoga Federal Constituency of Cross River State in the February 25, 2023, presidential and national assembly election which she lost. Her testimony in court failed to prove that there were no technical glitches
on the IReV portal of INEC as at 25 February 2023.
On Thursday, June 22, 2023, Atiku Abubakar called his 26th witness at the PEPT. His name is
Mr. Hitler Ewunonu Nwanna. Some online media gave his surname as Nwala but for the sake of simplicity, I will identify him as Mr. Nwanna. Mr. Hitler Ewunonu Nwanna who claimed to be a digital forensic analyst told the court that he inspected 110 Bimodal
Voters Accreditation System (BVAS) machines in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Abuja and found out that INEC had deleted election results inside them. Led in evidence by Atiku Abubakar’s Counsel, Chris Uche (SAN), Mr. Nwanna told the Court that he did
not know at what point the results were deleted from the machines. Questioned by INEC lawyer, Abubakar Mahmoud (SAN), how he, Mr. Nwanna, knew that election results in the BVAS were deleted, he said that he attached a standard device used for such an exercise
to the machines to arrive at his conclusion. Asked if he had the authority of INEC to attach an external device to the BVAS machines, Mr. Nwanna answered ‘yes’ but he could not remember if the request and permission were made and given orally or in writing.
When INEC lawyer asked Mr. Nwanna if he was aware that inspecting only 110 BVAS machines out of 3,163 sent to 2,822 polling units in the FCT constituted only 3.5% and 0.069% of BVAS machines deployed nationwide, Mr. Nwanna replied that he only compiled the
report and didn’t take out time to calculate the percentages. INEC Counsel, Abubakar Mahmoud (SAN), then gave a BVAS machine to the forensic analyst, Mr. Hitler Nwanna, to check if it was deleted. Refusing to check if the BVAS machine was deleted or not, Mr.
Hitler Nwanna said, “It is professionally wrong to access a device that will be used as evidence in a court of competent jurisdiction because it will tamper with the evidence.” “We cannot access the
device directly; what we do is to extract the evidence and take it for analysis.” He further told the court that since all the devices had the same model and looked the same outwardly, he couldn’t tell if the BVAS brought to the court was one of the
ones he inspected by merely looking at it.
The Counsel for APC, Lateef Fagbemi (SAN) pointed out that neither Mr. Hitler Ewunonu Nwanna nor any of his team members signed the six-volume forensic report,
the witness claimed that he signed it. Tinubu’s Counsel, Wole Olanipekun (SAN) pointed to part of the report where Mr. Nwanna asserted that from his inspection of the BVAS machines,
“nothing was intrinsically wrong with them.” Mr. Olanipekun then asked Mr. Nwanna, “Were you in Abuja on the day of the presidential election?” “If you were not in Abuja how then can you know that there was nothing wrong with the
BVAS machines on the day of election?” Responding, Mr. Nwanna said that he was not in Abuja and so, he couldn’t have known if something went wrong with the machines on the day of the election. INEC’s Counsel, Abubakar Mahmoud, exposed the bluff of the
digital forensic analyst in trying to extrapolate results of his inspection of 110 BVAS machines (3,5%) on the rest 3,053 (96.5%) un-inspected BVAS machines. When he was offered a BVAS machine to demonstrate how he arrived at the decision that the 110 BVAS
machines he inspected have gotten their election results deleted, he refused saying he did not want to tamper with evidential content of the machine. Realizing that he had already tampered with the contents of the 110 BVAS machines he claimed to have found
deleted of their election results, Mr. Nwanna tried to hide behind a needle. The charlatan pretending to be an expert in digital forensic analysis told the court,
“We cannot access the device directly; what we do is to extract the evidence and take it for analysis.” However, Atiku Abubakar’s digital forensic analyst was not willing and was unable to extract evidence from a BVAS machine
given to him in court to analyse so as to determine if something was intrinsically wrong with the machine or if its contents had been deleted. And the PEPT took notice of the inconsistency in Mr. Nwana’s evidence.
Does electoral law make it mandatory to transmit election results electronically? This question was appropriately answered in a suit filed by the Labour Party in
an Abuja High Court on August 22, 2022 while seeking court order to direct INEC to transmit the results of February 25, 2023 election electronically. INEC was not notified of the case and therefore, was not represented in court when Labour Party counsel, Monday
Mawah, argued the case before Justice Emeka Nwite. About a month to the Presidential election, Justice Emeka Nwite, on January 23, 2023, delivered judgment on Labour Party’s suit seeking the order of the Court to compel INEC to transmit the results of 25 February
2023 elections electronically. Refusing to grant the order, Justice Nwite said that Section 47 (2) cited by the counsel of the Labour party, Mr. Monday Mawah, and on which his request for order rested only deals with
accreditations of voters using smart card readers but not collation or transmission of results as wrongly postulated by the learned Counsel. The Judge ruled that according to Sections 50(2), 60(5) and 64(6) of the Electoral Acts 2022, INEC is at liberty
to prescribe the manner in which election results could be transmitted. In other words, uploading and transmission of election results are at the discretion of the Commission according to afore-cited Sections of the Electoral Acts 2022. Despite this judgment
that preceded February 25, 2023 election, Atiku and Obi still went to PEPT to argue that INEC violated the Electoral Acts, 2022 by not transmitting election results electronically. When PEPT on September 6, 2023, held that no law says INEC must mandatorily
transfer or transmit results of election from polling units electronically, Atiku and Obi cried foul without saying which sections of the Electoral Acts, 2022 compel INEC to transmit election results in the manner they were demanding.
In the Presidential election, the number of accredited voters in the FCT, Abuja, was 478,923 and total valid votes cast were 460,071. Peter Obi won 281,717 votes
while Bola Ahmed Tinubu won 90, 902 votes and Atiku Abubakar won 74,199 votes. From the total valid vote cast in Abuja, Peter Obi scored more than 25% while Tinubu and Atiku won 19.76% and 16.13% respectively. Based on the percentage of votes won by Tinubu
in Abuja, Mr. Peter Gregory Obi as well as Atiku Abubakar asked the PEPT to nullify the election of Tinubu, citing Section 134 (2) (b) of the 1999 Constitution as amended. For clarity,
Section 134 (2) (b) of the 1999 Constitution as amended states that:
A candidate for an election to the office of President shall be deemed to have been duly elected where there being more than two candidates for the election – (a) he has the highest number of votes cast at the election; and (b)
he has not less than one-quarter of the votes cast at the election each of at least two-thirds of all the States in the Federation and the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja.
Simplified, the constitution stipulates that for one to be declared elected President in an election the candidate, apart from scoring the highest number of votes, must also obtain 25% of the votes cast in two-thirds of all the States and Abuja. According
to the election results released by INEC Bola Ahmed Tinubu won 25% of votes cast in 29 states but not in Abuja. Thus, Peter Obi and his Labour Party argued at PEPT that it would not have mattered if Tinubu had scored 25% in all the 36 States of Nigeria, he
should not have been declared winner of the election for failing to score 25% of the votes cast in the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja.
With regards to Section 134(2) (b) of the 1999 Constitution which talks about scoring 25% votes in two-thirds of the States of Nigeria and the FCT, Tinubu’s Counsel,
Wole Olanipekun drew the attention of the PEPT to the fact that “there is no punctuation (comma) in the entire Section 134 (2)(b) of the Constitution, particularly, immediately after the ‘states’ and the succeeding ‘and’ connecting the Federal Capital Territory
with the States.” He submitted, “Mr. Obi’s ‘remote’ argument that Mr. Tinubu’s victory should be nullified on account of not scoring 25% or one-quarter of the votes recorded in the FCT lacks legal backing as the use of ‘and’ in that section of the constitution
is conjunctive and not disjunctive.” The importance of what Counsel Olanipekun told the PEPT is that part of Section 134 (2)(b) of the Constitution which says, “of all the States
in the Federation and the Federal Capital territory,” does not make Abuja the electoral college of Nigeria. The total valid votes cast in the Presidential election, according to INEC, was 24, 025, 940 of which the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja
was 460, 071 valid votes. If we subtract the total votes cast in Abuja from the total votes cast in the whole country, we will get 23, 565, 869 votes. In the simple arithmetic of Peter Gregory Obi and his dregs of Senior Advocates of Nigeria, Abuja’s 460,
071 votes are greater than 23, 565, 869 votes or the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja, which is 713 square kilometres in size is bigger than all the 36 states in Nigeria with a combined land mass of 931, 280 square kilometres. And as such, Abuja should be
conferred with power of superiority to decide who should be, or not be, President of Nigeria in an election. Rascal Nigerian intellectuals are known for lacking commonsense and for disregarding logic, science or reality. Thus, when the PEPT told Obi and his
LP that the Constitution does not confer the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja, with
veto vote over all the 36 states of the Federation they accused judiciary of partiality and injustice.
In what appears as a pretence of being judicially fair to all parties in the petition, PEPT declared against the submission of APC and Tinubu’s lawyers that Peter
Gregory Obi was not qualified to contest the February 25, 2023 presidential election on the platform of the Labour Party, since
according to Section 77 (2&3) of the Electoral Acts 2022, Peter Gregory Obi was not a registered member of the Labour Party as at 30 May 2022 when the LP conducted its Presidential primary for the February 25, 2023 election. For sake of clarity Section 77
(2) of the Electoral Acts, 2022, mandates every political party to maintain a register of its members in soft and hard copy. In addition to that, Section 77 (3) of the 2022 Electoral Acts,
compels every political party to forward register containing its members to INEC not later than 30 days before the date fixed for its primaries, congresses or convention.
Right from its inception, PDP is contained, mostly, of political entrepreneurs with intention to defraud Nigerians. For Peter Obi who was a merchant at Alaba market in Lagos, before he ruled Anambra State as a Governor between 2006 and March 2014 on the
platform of APGA, PDP was a fertile political soil to plant his mastery of entrepreneurship after his tenure ended in Anambra. Thus, on October 7, 2014, Obi divorced APGA to marry PDP politically. By 2019, Obi had risen in the PDP to become vice Presidential
candidate to Atiku Abubakar, the party’s presidential candidate for that year which they later lost to the pair of Muhammadu Buhari/Yemi Osinbajo’s APC. While Abubakar retreated to lick his wound after his petition against the election of Buhari up to the
Supreme Court came to nothing, Obi was rubbing his palms together in prayers that after the eight years tenure of Buhari in 2023, the presidency would be zoned to the South according to the Constitution of the PDP and he stood the chance of picking the ticket
because no Southeast indigene (an Igbo) has been elected President of Nigeria since 1999. In 2022, Olusegun Obasanjo turned out to be a good observer for characterizing Atiku Abubakar in Volume two, page 192 of his book, My Watch, thus,
“I had come to know Atiku for his connivance in covering up and not being
straightforward on matters requiring truth and candour.” There was no honour among People Deceiving People (PDP) and Atiku Abubakar refused to respect the Constitution of PDP on zoning of the presidency between North and South after a two-term tenure
of eight years.
On April 29, 2022, Peter Obi and Atiku Abubakar were among the 15 members of PDP screened and cleared to contest in the PDP presidential primary scheduled to take
place on 28 May 2022. That means, if PDP had complied with Section 77 (2 & 3) of the Electoral Acts, 2022, PDP should have forwarded a register containing its members to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) on, or before, 28 April 2022,
in compliance with Section 77(3) of the Electoral Acts, 2022. Certainly, the PDP membership register thus forwarded to INEC, on, or before, 28 April 2022 must have contained the name of Peter Gregory Obi. However, four days to the PDP presidential primary
election, Tuesday, 24 May 2022, Peter Obi resigned his membership from the PDP. On Friday, 27 May 2022, he joined Labour Party (LP) which was to hold its presidential primary election on Monday, 30 May 2022 where Peter Obi later emerged as the Presidential
candidate of the LP after being a member for three days. If LP had complied with Section 77 (2&3) of the Electoral Act 2022, it must have sent its memberships’ register to INEC, on, or before May 1, 2022, a good 27 days before Peter Gregory Obi joined the
Labour Party and as such his name could not have been in the register of members forwarded to INEC. Why are political parties required according to Electoral Act 2022, Section 77 (3) to forward their memberships’ register to INEC, thirty days before their
primaries, congresses or convention? This is a question that APC and Tinubu’s legal representatives should ask the Supreme Court to answer in order to determine if Peter Gregory Obi was a qualified member of the LP to contest the 2023 presidential election
on the platform of the LP. It is noteworthy that before Sections 77(2 &3) of the Constitution were enacted it was common for any person who failed to secure nomination of their political party to contest in an election to cross-over to any registered party
to get nomination in exchange for money. Peter Gregory Obi must have prostituted the Labour party to become their presidential flag bearer at a primary where 185 members were said to have been accredited to vote even when the Labour Party’s Home Page boasted
of 30 million members.
governed a State in Nigeria for eight years in accordance having fulfilled the requirements in Part IV, Article 318(1) (a) (b) (c) (i) (ii) (iii) and (d) of the 1999 Constitution as amended. If Atiku Abubakar is doubting the academic qualification of Bola
Ahmed Tinubu to be President of Nigeria, what has he to say about his vice-Presidential candidate, Peter Gregory Obi, in the 2019 Presidential election and the Labour Party presidential aspirant in 2023 election? https://thestreetjournal.org/2023-controversy-trails-peter-obi-certificates-photos/
Concluding this essay, I have some remarks to make on the Nigerian Presidential aspirants, Atiku Abubakar and Peter Gregory Obi. Atiku Abubakar began his
carrier as a Customs Officer, stationed at Lagos Port of Apapa. As a Custom Officer, he set up a logistic company together with an Italian to do Clearing and Forwarding. It was an era when saw-dusts were imported from Europe to Nigeria as machine spare parts
and cleared with ease at Apapa Wharf. Atiku Abubakar, as Vice President was the head of privatisation of national assets said to have been worthed $100 billion but was dashed off at mere $5 billion. Atiku Abubakar, acting as de facto President of Nigeria secured
a 25-year concession (a sort of monopoly) for his Clearing and Forwarding company in 2006, when he was Vice President. Had Atiku Abubakar not sacrificed self-esteem and honour for self-interest, he should have allowed the application of zoning formular between
the North and South as enshrined in the PDP constitution to take place in the 2022 PDP presidential primary election. In that sense the two main political parties (APC and PDP) presidential candidates in the 25 February 2023 election, at least, would have
come from the South. There is not so much difference between Abubakar and Obi when it comes to political whoredom. The politics of self-interest made Atiku to join AC while sitting as a PDP Vice President and after being defeated as AC presidential candidate,
2007, he rejoined PDP but when he failed to get the presidential ticket of the PDP, 2015 he fled to the newly formed APC to contest in its presidential primary which he lost to Muhammadu Buhari, who subsequently defeated the PDP candidate, Goodluck Jonathan
in the 2015 presidential election. While PDP was in disarray after losing the Presidential election of 2015, Atiku Abubakar moved back to PDP to contest the 2019 presidential election with Peter Obi as his running mate. Party for Social Democracy was formed
in 2002 and changed its name to Labour Party in 2003, the year Peter Gregory Obi contested on the platform of APGA for the governorship of Anambra State. Although Obi were not to retrieve his Gubernatorial mandate until 2006, he however governed Anambra State
on the platform of All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) till March 17, 2014. Obi finished his two-term governorship tenure in 2014 with his name emblazoned in the Pandora papers of ignominy. About seven months after exiting Governorship office in Anambra,
he absconded from APGA to join PDP on October 7, 2014 and President Goodluck Jonathan rewarded him with appointment as
Chairman of Securities and Exchange Commission.
When Peter Gregory Obi saw that his chance of becoming PDP’s presidential flag bearer in the 2023 election was very slim, he joined the Labour Party on May, Friday
27, 2022 and three days later, he succeeded in purchasing the presidential ticket of the LP, even though politically and ideologically he is an avowed anti-socialist and anti-welfarist. Former President Olusegun Obasanjo quickly adopted Peter Obi as his 2023
Presidential candidate and tried to tout him as a representative and mouth-speak of Nigerian youths and a leader of political third force in the country. United Nations General Assembly’s resolution 36/28 of 1981 endorsed the definition of youths as persons
aged between 15 and 24. All UN statistics on youth are based on this definition. Article 1 of the United Nations Convention on the rights of a child also defines children as persons up to the age of 18. The African Youths Charter recognises youths as people
between the age of 15 and 35. The period between Youth and old age, 60 years is called middle age. Thus, Youth ends at a maximum of age of 35 years. Peter Obi was 45 when he reclaimed his mandate in Anambra in 2006 and was 61+ when he contested the 2023 presidential
election. Therefore, touting Peter Gregory Obi as a representative of the Nigerian Youths is deceptive and deception is like a drug which effectiveness ends on expiry date. Obasanjo’s third force ended up in third farce and the deceptive castle of myths
erected by Atiku Abubakar and Peter Gregory Obi at PEPT crumbled.
S. Kadiri
