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…as star witness tenders documents criticizing election, and certificate forgery
From Yakubu Busari,Jos
The legal team of the Labour Party and the party’s Rep candidate, Daniel Asama on Wednesday said they have subpoenaed Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, Prof Mahmood Yakubu through the Plateau State INEC to compel him to appear and produce electoral documents before the National Houses of Assembly Election Petitions Tribunal sitting in Jos .
Asama’s lawyer, N.D Gwaison said he has formally written to summon the INEC Chairman, but they refused to honoured it .
According to him , the certified True Copies of electoral documents is to be tendered at the court. He said he would in addition formally obtain subpoenas to compel the Secretary of the Commission, Rose Oriarian-Anton, as well as INEC’s National Commissioner, Festus Okoye to appear before the court.
“I want to state that it has gotten to the stage where we summon the police commissioner , the INEC Resident Commissioner, to appear in court with documents. We are constrained and we don’t have right over them we will make the formal application”, Gwaison told the tribunal .
Gwaison presented two witnesses Suleh Atul Agun who served as the Local Coordinator of the LP at collection centre in Jos North LGA during the 25th February, 2023 election as its regular witness before court in its petition challenging the election of Hon.Musa Avia Agah ,PDP ,Hon Goni Muhammad Adamu Alkali ,PRP, and INEC as 5th respondent .
He told the tribunal Chairman ,Honourable Justice William Olamide that they have some documents to tender in support of the suit and seek the leave of the court to explain that Appeal Court was equally subpoena to tender judgment of the appeal .
However, Suleh Agun the witness adopted his witness statement on oath wherein dated 19th day of March ,2023, which showed through the clerk as B.B when on cross examination by Pius .Akubo ,SAN, told the tribunal the he went through a successful accreditation and voted in his own polling unit before embarking on a tour of all the polling units in Jos North, Bassa .
Justice William marked the documents with exhibits no ,B1,B2,B3 ,B4 ,B5,&B6 respectively which are judgement by the High Court judgment, Appeal Court and Supreme Court and others judgment obtained as the petitioners sought the tribunal to disqualify the winner on the grounds of alteration ,manipulation ,mutilation and cancelation of results .
Suleh PW1 explained that he was surprise that nobody was responsible for the complaint raised as only the adhoc staff of INEC were present before arriving on why the exercise was marred by irregularities and manipulation of results .
He stressed that all effort to see that the issue of certificate forgery was certified prove abortive as they have suffered setback to tender the documents to the court as exhibits .
Under cross examination by Musa Agah’s lawyer, Pius Akubo , the star witness and petitioner Daniel Asama admitted that the polling unit result is the primary source of validating election results, while alleging deliberate bypass of the BVAS machine during the National Assembly election.
Agah disclosed that the petitioner Daniel Asama wasn’t a collation agent, who, under cross examination by Akubo alleged that there were secret polling units that conducted illegal thumb printing of results .
Gwaison subsequently called for adjournment of his matter till Monday ,19th June ,2023 .
