‘INEC has nothing to hide on presidential election,’ Yakubu tells Labour Party

The Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Mahmood Yakubu, said on Monday the commission would make available all necessary documents on last month’s presidential election for inspection by interested parties.

Yakubu stated this when he received a team of lawyers from the Labour Party led by Dr. Livy Uzoukwu (SAN) in Abuja.

He acknowledged the receipt of a letter dated March 6 from the LP, notifying the commission of the team’s visit to its headquarters.

He added that the letter also requested INEC to get in touch with its Resident Electoral Commissioners (RECs) across the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) to make the documents available for the prosecution of the LP’s petition.

The INEC chief said: “ I want to assure you that the commission will not hide any document from anybody and will make available any document that they have requested.

“Please be assured that INEC has nothing to hide and whatever you are asking for will be made available to you.

“There are two categories of documents those that are in possession of the headquarters of INEC we will easily make these documents available to you.

“Specifically the EC8Ds from the states and the EC8DA, which is the collation at the national collation centre by the commission itself.

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“The EC8DA, the declaration, so many documents, a total of I think 39 documents, this we can easily certify and give you almost immediately.”

On his part, Uzoukwu said the visit was to prepare the ground for the inspection of the materials for the presidential election.

“As you all know, an election petition is time sensitive and we have 21 days to file a petition on behalf of our clients. Let me say that out of that 21 days we probably have about 10 days to go and up till now we have not received any documents.

“We have written to INEC requesting for documents and apart from that, the Court of Appeal made an order on March 3, ordering INEC to release those documents to us. But we haven’t received any, hence we requested a meeting with the chairman of finance.

“INEC graciously granted that audience within a very short notice, and he has given us assurance, concrete assurance on record that all documents we require will be made available and if possible, some of them will be made available to us today.”

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