 Jani Nus live now is a legal practitioner, Johnson Argo, to take a look at this issue as it's unfolding. Good evening Johnson, how are you? Good evening Maureen, it's good to be here. All right, well let's just start by understanding first of all how INEC did not comply substantially with the constitution and the provisions of the electoral act. Actually INEC did not say they did not comply, INEC's position is that they complied. But the judge is saying they didn't? Well it's debatable because well on the face of the judgment they just said it is not complied with but each party is still contending they still have their rights to appeal but the substance of the judge's decision is that you haven't used the beavers properly and you have the on the basis of the beavers report that you issued there is evidence that some other person should have won the election. Well the parties are still contending as to whether the particular or the proper beavers report issued was relied on by the court and that is why there are let me call it two sets of judgments won by the majority of the court and won by a minority member of the court that the judgment is actually not unanimous is two to one. In the first set of judgments given by the lead judge and a concurrent judge they say that the beavers report issued at some point earlier should be the one to be relied upon and on the face of it Oetola should have won if you subtract a certain number of votes that are not captured in the beavers report but the dissenting judge says that we should have been relying on the beavers report that captures the entire thing which INEC has testified was made after the whole beavers system has synchronized so the dissenting judges of the opinion that the later beavers report is the more authentic and the one that should be relied upon but the majority saw it the other way. Why are we having this back and forth about the majority and minority seeing because the beavers is something that Nigerians having so much hope on especially with regards to the fourth community elections that with the beavers we can't get it wrong. I had interviewed one of INEC commissioners and we were thoroughly assured not to have the beavers being questioned. I don't think it is the beavers that is being questioned. What is being questioned here is the reports, the tendency of reports that came which of the reports is correct. Let me put it this way, was there a possibility of somebody feeding some figures to the beavers after the correct report has been The fact that someone can feed whatever means manipulation, the Justice Sasi Kuma led panel in his judgment said there was overvoting on the examination of beavers manipulation. We also learned that beavers was not using all the LGA so which begs two questions meaning that the beavers which all hope would ensure that they won't be rigging can actually be manipulated and also that there is this possibility that not every area would be covered with regards to the beavers being used during the election. I am going to assume that the Justice Kuma decision is correct but there is still some debate here whether I am not trying to defend INEC but these things are questions of technology. So the functions of beavers here is not that people will not try to be wrong. I mean we will not try to do wrong but as technology what it is is that if you do any wrong there will be a thrill of that wrong and there will be evidence of it and it will be easier for people to retrieve their mandates from the court. So if we assume that Justice Kuma's decision is correct beavers has done this function by showing that thrill to show when and who are where the things got wrong you know what I mean right. So if it is that the first report which INEC says was issued at a time the beavers system has not synchronized it sounds like to be that the second report is evidence of manipulation. So yetola has now used the product of the beavers to retrieve his mandate. But that means INEC has some questions to answer though because why would the result be released when it has not synchronized when the collision had not been synchronized. Maybe this will be a lesson to INEC. So if it does not want to be perceived as incapable or as fraudulent it will develop a system or guideline that allows it to issue authentic results and authentic reports. But I don't see the technology as 40. The technology has done its job. If you say the report is manipulated it simply means that the machine has provided thrill of that manipulation. So for me this is good for democracy. All right. But Governor Deleke has folded the judgment and he has called it a miscarriage of justice and he wants to appeal it. Now do you agree with this position about this unfairness and on what grounds should he be appealing legally? This will depend on the reasons the judges have given. So if he thinks that they should have for example he may be alleging that the evidence that we are considered we are not properly considered there is exclusion of the correct evidence. He can appeal on that basis. He can say that the judgment is against the weight of evidence. So he can appeal on he has a lot of these lawyers will decide for him will advise him on the proper grounds. But on the face of the stuff I mean on the face of the judgment it is easy for someone to say I am not satisfied and that is the result of every contestation and that is actually why there is room for appeal and this appeal system where I mean allowing someone to express dissatisfaction at Anapele Tribuna is the good thing about this kind of democratic practice. Yeah. Let's dig further into what the lecturer says about overvoting. I'm not sure I'm satisfied that I've gotten enough answer on that. The lecturer actually says that the end of election before you vote you must go to the accretation point and the smart card reader or any technology that INEC might elist to assist it in accretation of people will be used to accretate you. At the end of the period of accretation you vote and the eligible voters are calculated on the basis of the number of people that the technology used for accretation captured such that if there are 10 people that have been accredited if there is any vote above 10 there has been an overvoting. So in a situation where you have say one million votes but the machine or the system of accretation adopted by INEC captures just 500. The extra 500 people has overvoted. So that's exactly what has been applied in this instance. The machine or the report, Bivast report at the time the petitioner that is APC and its candidate obtained the Bivast report showed that at least 1801,000 people have not been synchronized to the Bivast system backend. So what the tribuna simply did was to subtract the votes of 181,000 people from the total votes and in which of the polling units were affected I defined about 744 units. So you subtract this votes from 744 units what did each person get the sum total of every candidate's votes at the end of it they were subtracted for example in the case of Uyetola 60,000 votes or thereabout that we are gathered from the 744 polling units we are subtracted in the case of Adelike about 112,705 votes that we have gotten from those 744 polling units we are subtracted and whatever that remained is sure that Uyetola got about 314,000 votes and Adelike got about 290 votes creating a deficit of about a winning gap of about 20,000 votes so in the instance the tribuna had no option on the basis of evidence it decided to accept to hold that Uyetola has won the election if it were under the old system the tribuna will go ahead and ask this number of polling units we have cancelled would have given about 180,000 votes or so so we will not declare the election conclusive because if you count the possible votes from these 744 units it is possible to get votes that are higher than the winning margin so under the old system what the tribuna would have done is to probably declare the election inconclusive and order a run in those units but what this system has done for us is it is easy to trail or trace where the fault is and isolate that particular the code it has been avoided though because this is just one small state I believe it can be avoided what was that signal about the forthcoming elections I believe it can be avoided and I think it's actually confidence building rather than discouraging because it says to everybody go ahead about your normal business ensure that people vote and ensure that the beavers is used in the accreditation don't allow anybody to allow anybody to tell you to vote don't worry we will accredit let and know just ensure that the beavers system is used in the accreditation and at the end of the day go home nobody is going to manipulate the result because whatever the beavers has accredit is what we are going to use to determine who won okay so finally what was the input of this judgment going forward it says that Nigeria is getting ready to ensure that as many people as are accredited are the only number of votes expected in every election so accreditation is now as important as the number of votes itself well thank you Mr Justin Johnson-Argo Mr Johnson-Argo is a legal practitioner thank you so much for your time and insight thank you sir hello hope you enjoyed the news please do subscribe to our youtube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates