TRIBUNAL: Atiku’s petition worthless —INEC

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) on Wednesday described petition by Atiku Abubakar and his party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), as ‘worthless’.

The commission also said that it would have amounted to mere waste of court time for it to call witnesses in a mater “the petitioners failed to prove anything”.

Atiku, the presidential candidate of the PDP and his party are challenging INEC’s declaration of Buhari as the winner of the 2019 presidential election.

They accused INEC of abandoning poll results transmitted to its server for fake results, which it used, to announce Buhari winner of the election.

But making its final submissions as the first respondent in the petition at the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal, filed by Atiku and the PDP, INEC urged the court to dismiss the petition.

The commission’s lawyer, Yunus Usman (SAN) while adopting his clients’ final addresses before tribunal, insisted that INEC had no server.

He also denied the commission abandoned its pleadings by not calling any witnesses.

He said, “This is a worthless petition. INEC did not abandon its pleadings. It only extracted salient evidence from their (petitioners) witnesses.

“It would have been a waste of the court’s time to call witnesses when the petitioners failed to prove anything and admitted the issues we advanced in our pleadings.

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“We urge the court to dismiss this petition, which was meant to test the water with two legs, and they are now falling.”

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