The Labour Party has said it will embark on a nationwide protest over the alleged refusal of the Independent National Electoral Commission, (INEC) to obey the order of the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal directing it to grant the party and its presidential candidate, Peter Obi, access to the certified true copies of materials used in the conduct of the 2023 presidential poll.
The spokesman of the Presidential Campaign Council of the party, Dr. Yunusa Tanko, disclosed this at a press conference in Lagos.
According to him, the order of the presidential election petition tribunal was duly served on INEC on March 3 despite the fact that the commission was present and represented at the tribunal when the order was made.
He said the party also sent a letter to the Commission on March 6, reminding the electoral umpire that it was yet to obey the order.
The Chief Spokesman for the Obi-Datti Presidential Campaign Council, warned that the party would be compelled to mobilise its supporters to occupy INEC offices nationwide if the Commission failed to obey the order of the court within the next 72 hours.
This announcement comes days after the Presidential candidate of the People’s Democratic Party, PDP, Atiku Abubakar, and his running mate, Ifeanyi Okowa led a protest at the national headquarters of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in Abuja.
Both Atiku and Peter Obi rejected the declaration of Bola Ahmed Tinubu as President-Elect after he came out tops in 12 of Nigeria’s 36 states, and secured significant numbers in several other states to claim the highest number of votes — 8,794,726.
They faulted INEC for not uploading election results from polling units electronically to the commission’s Results Viewing Portal (IReV), as stipulated by Section 60 of the Electoral Act 2022.
“The weekend election was neither free nor fair. Preliminary assessments indicate that it is the worst conducted elections since the return to democratic rule. The manipulation and fraud that attended this election were unprecedented in the history of our nation,” the former vice president said last Thursday.
