The presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party in the last
election, Atiku Abubakar, is set to call Microsoft, IBM and Oracle
experts to authenticate his claim that the servers belonging to INEC
showed that he defeated President Muhammadu Buhari by over 1.6 million
votes.
Atiku also identified the server where the results are kept as
INEC_PRES_RSLT_SRV2019 and its unique Mac address as 94-57-A5-DC-64-B9 with Microsoft Product ID 00252-70000-0000-AA535.
The PDP candidate said this in fresh response to the reply of INEC to his petition.
Atiku and the PDP will also be expected to tender INEC’s training manual on elections, a
printout of the votes of candidates from smart card readers and a
printout of the forensic audit report on INEC’s server as evidence.
The former Vice-President and the PDP claimed to have polled a total of
18,356,732 votes to defeat President Muhammadu Buhari and the All
Progressives Congress who he said scored 16,741,430 votes.
However, INEC’s Director, Information and Communications Technology, Mr
Chidi Nwafor, in his witness statement on oath attached to the reply,
specifically denied the “server results” which the PDP and Atiku were
laying claim to.
He said all the results were collated manually and were never transmitted electronically.
Atiku, in his fresh response, said the figures he claimed to have scored were genuine.
The reply read in part, “The servers from which the said figures were
derived belong to the 1st respondent (INEC). The figures and votes were
transmitted to the 1st respondent’s Presidential result’s server 1 and
thereafter aggregated in INEC_PRES_RSLT_SRV2019 whose physical address
or unique Mac address as 94-57-A5-DC-64-B9 with Microsoft Product ID
00252-70000-0000-AA535. The descriptions are unique to the 1st
respondent’s server.”
On how the case would be argued, the PDP and Atiku stated, “The
petitioners will at the trial of this petition rely on experts on
Microsoft, IBM and Oracle, amongst others.”
The PDP candidate and his party said one of the spokespersons for the
Buhari Campaign Organisation, Festus Keyamo (SAN), even attested to the
fact that the election data was in INEC’s servers when he wrote a
petition to the Inspector-General of Police calling on him to arrest
Atiku.
The PDP and Atiku said INEC’s claim that the transmission of results
was purely manual was a lie. They made references to several press
statements issued by INEC insisting that there would be an electronic
component of results collation.
Atiku and his party said there was nothing in the Electoral Act that barred INEC from transmitting results electronically.
They said INEC also lied when it claimed that its directive on election
day was that card readers should only be used in areas where they
worked.
The PDP and its presidential candidate added, “The petitioners shall at
trial lead evidence to show that the first respondent (INEC) stated on
several occasions before and after the elections that the use of card
readers was compulsory.”
The petitioners also stated that INEC through its Chairman and Returning
Officer, Prof Mahmoud Yakubu, committed grave errors in the final
collation of the presidential results.
The INEC boss was said to have muddled up the results, announcing the wrong figures.
Meanwhile, the PDP has come to the defence of Atiku’s lead counsel, Dr
Livy Uzoukwu (SAN), whom INEC claimed was not a legal practitioner and
was not licensed to practise law.
In a witness statement signed by a former Minister of Aviation, Osita
Chidoka, the party said Uzoukwu was called to the bar in 1982 and was
even the attorney-general of Imo State from 1994 to 1996.
