ENUGU, Nigeria (VOICE OF NAIJA) – The Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC), on Thursday, admonished the legal team of the Labour Party (LP) and its presidential candidate, Mr Peter Obi, over their failure to properly organize its schedule of documents for seamless tendering as exhibits.
Obi and his party filed a petition challenging the outcome of the 25 February presidential election.
The Court, at the resumed hearing of the petition, frowned at the team’s inability to present its schedule of documents in a manner that would be easy for the court to comprehend.
Following this, the court abruptly stepped down after hearing the petition for some minutes to enable the lawyers, led by Professor Awa Kalu, SAN, to put its house in order.
After resuming from the short break, the presentation of documents being handled by Mr Emeka Okpoko, SAN, still seemed not to have been done in the direction that had been agreed upon during the pre-hearing stage.
This led to the judges asking Obi’s team to take an adjournment and put their house in order before returning to tender the documents.
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Justice Misitura Bolaji-Yusuf specifically said that the whole exercise of the petitioners was a waste of the court’s time.
He said: “What we have done today is a waste of time. The poor way you have arranged the documents will cause confusion for both of you and the court.
“At this stage, it is better for you to go back and rearrange those documents in a sequence so as to help yourselves and the court.”
However, Kalu prayed the court to allow his team to tender the documents they had rather than take an adjournment since they had already lost one day.
The court allowed the petitioners to proceed following the appeal after which the petitioners said they would challenge the election results in 18 out of the 36 States.
The petitioners proceeded to tender certified true copies of electoral documents obtained from the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in six out of the 18 States whose results they are challenging.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the documents are mainly Forms EC8A, which are election results from polling units.
The documents were admitted as exhibits and marked appropriately by the Chairman of the Court, Justice Haruna Tsammani.
Also, NAN reports that INEC, who issued the documents to the petitioners, objected to all the documents being admitted in evidence.