Former vice president Atiku Abubakar and his party, the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP on Tuesday said they would round off their petition against President Bola Tinubu on Thursday, June 22.
The lead counsel to the party and Atiku, Chris Uche, SAN, said this at the resumed hearing in their petition.
In a joint petition, Atiku and PDP are challenging the outcome of the February 25 election, which produced Tinubu as the elected president as declared by the Independent National Electoral Commission.
The petitioners, according to the pre-hearing schedule drafted by the court, were given three weeks to prove their case, which was slated to end yesterday.
However, they were granted two extra days, which they lost in the course of the proceedings for different reasons – one of which was the June 12 public holiday in celebration of Democracy Day.
Although the petitioners stated during the preliminary hearing in the case that they would call a hundred witnesses in aid of their petition, they have so far called only 25.
Addressing newsmen after their session, Uche said, “We are closing our case on Thursday, it was supposed to end today, but because we lost two days, one of which was the June 12 public holiday, the court graciously extended our time by two days.” He asserted that some of the documents they will tender in the last two days will take the place of the remaining 70 witnesses.
Also at Tuesday’s proceeding, their joint petition came to a premature end following the presentation of unsorted documents before the election petition court. The court disagreed with their move to tender form EC8A series, that is, polling unit results beginning in Abia State.
According to the court, the documents were not properly sorted.
INEC’s lawyer, Kemi Pinero, had disagreed with Uche. He said it was incumbent on the parties to arrange the electoral documents given to them by the commission through a subpoena. Moreso, he said that the documents sought to be tendered by the PDP were brought by INEC’s officials from across the country.
He also stated that despite producing the documents, the PDP had not paid for its certification