A witness of Atiku Abubakar, the Peoples Democratic Party’s presidential candidate in the February 25th presidential elections, Ndubuisi Nwobu has revealed how his candidate was rigged out by Labour Party’s Presidential candidate, Peter Obi in Anambra state.
Nwobu told the presidential election tribunal, Wednesday that “magic happened to the votes of the PDP candidate at different collation centres.
In the results announced by the Independent Electoral Commission, Peter Obi scored 584, 621 votes in Anambra; Atiku polled 9,036 votes in the state and Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress scored 5, 111 votes.
During proceedings, Nwobu who is Anambra PDP chairman and also the state collation agent of the party told the court that after the counting of votes, presiding officers refused to upload the results.
He also said he visited about 30 polling units out of the 4,720 polling units in the state on election day.
He said he was forced to sign the result sheet of the election at the state collation centre because he wouldn’t have been given a copy if he didn’t.
“I signed the result sheet when it was obvious that without signing, a copy would not be made available to me,” Nwobu said.
“Results were entered at polling units. But, every effort made to get the presiding officer to upload it on IREV proved abortive.”
When asked if result sheets were signed by agents of the PDP at polling units before there were taken to the collation centre, Nwobu said “yes”.
“They were taken to the collation centre at the ward level. That is where magic started happening,” he said.
“There were problems at the polling units with presiding officers.”
He said in some instances, he had to intervene to prevent voters and other party agents from attacking INEC officials.
“Even in certain instances, I had to intervene to ensure that some of the polling officers were not attacked by voters and other political party agents,” Nwobu said.
Nwobu is Atiku’s eleventh witness to testify before the five-member panel headed by Haruna Tsammani.
Credit: The PUNCH
