 The Independent National Electoral Commission, INAG, has for the first time responded to accusation that he failed to follow the Electoral Act of 2022 and also failed to abide by its own guidelines on the mode of collation of results in the last presidential elections. The development comes in response to a petition by the Action People's Party, the APP, before the presidential election petition court in the FCT. The APP is challenging the result of the presidential poll and a declaration of all progressive Congress APC standard bearer, Bola Tinubu, on the grounds of alleged substantial non-compliance with the electoral laws of Nigeria as well as the breach of the INAG guidelines. But in reply to the suit instituted by one of the parties, the APP INAG threw one of its lawyers, Abu Bakr Muhammad, insisted that it conducted free and fair polls on February 25th. The APP had alleged that INAG breached its own laws and guidelines. However, INAG dismissed the party's argument that the resort collision were to be done electronically, citing paragraph 50 to 55 of the regulation guidelines for the conduct of the 2023 presidential election. It also dismissed the allegation that its officials doctored result of favor a particular political party's candidate or theirs over voting. The date for hearing of the five petition for the so-been received from the People's Democratic Party, the Labor Party, the APP Action Alliance, and the Allied People's Movement is yet to be fixed by the PEPC. Earlier, there was conversation with legal practitioner on the issue and this is what he had to say. INAG adopted its own regulation, which is the regulation that was used for this election, and then the regulation in section 38 introduced electronic regulation or transmission of results into the system. And after that introduction, because that is what is the discretion that section 1cc gave to INAG to correct its own regulation, but no discretion, and to release that to correct its own way of managing or carrying out elections, electoral activities. That discretion was done by the enactment of this regulation, and this regulation introduced electronic transmission. So there's no more discretion for INAG. Once it says in section 38 of the electoral regulation that election results would be transmitted from the polling unit by the electoral officers, then a reason there's no more, no longer discretion for INAG to say that they are going to use both manual transmission and electronic transmission, but manual transmission and electronic transmission. That is, what would have been possible if that regulation was not enacted, and then INAG went out of its way to inform the governments that it is going to transmit a result in life real-time from polling units. It gave Nigerians that confidence. And that was why many Nigerians drove out to the street to carry out their civic responsibility. I do not believe, I do not want to align with the position that INAG has a gestation to now decide on the day of the election to transmit some result and then collect some results manually. So my thinking is that this is, and after all, this is wrong from inception. INAG has no discretion to transmit results electronically. It has no discretion to collect results. Outside the transmission by electronic means that it itself introduced into the regulation.