The Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, has appointed nine Senior Advocates of Nigeria, SANs, to defend it at the February 25th presidential election tribunal.
The lawyers who will be led by the former President of the Nigerian Bar Association, NBA, Abubakar Mahmoud will include Stephen Adehi (SAN), Oluwakemi Pinheiro (SAN), Miannaya Essien (SAN), and Abdullahi Aliyu (SAN)
Also, four other senior advocates who are staff of INEC’s legal department will join the team alongside Messrs Garba Hassan, Musa Attah, and Patricia Obi.
The Labour Party presidential candidate Peter Obi and Atiku Abubakar, the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party had petitioned the presidential election tribunal over the violence witnessed at the election and the declaration of President-elect Asiwaju Bola Tinubu on March 1st as the winner of the election.
In the 2022 Electoral Act, INEC stated that election results will be transmitted online, a promise which it reneged on and abandoned for the manual mode of collation of results.
On March 11, Justice Emeka Nwite of the Federal High Court in Abuja ruled that only INEC has the authority to decide its mode of collating results from polling units and transmission of the results.
