INEC blocks ACN lawyers access to poll materials

Officials of the Independent National Electoral Commission(INEC) in Adamawa State have blocked lawyers of the Action Congress of Nigeria from having access to the election materials used for the 14 February governorship election.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that INEC officials told  ACN lawyers and officials, along with their PDP counterparts who turned up for the exercise on Saturday, that the time limit for the inspection of the materials had elapsed.

The INEC Administrative Secretary, Ahaji Usman Baba, said that they received a directive from INEC lawyers to discontinue the inspection exercise as the time limit provided for the exercise had elapsed.

In separate reactions, the lead counsel to ACN, Mr Jonathan Sanda, and the running mate of ACN gubernatorial candidate in the election, Alhaji Abdulrazak Namda, insisted that INEC was wrong on the time limit.

They insisted that the governorship election tribunal granted ACN the relief to inspect the materials on March 30 and the order was served INEC April 2.They said that INEC, in its response to the order, had fixed April 11 for the commencement of the inspection which was expected to be completed within two weeks.They wondered why the commission suspended the exercise just three days after it commenced.

“So far, we inspected materials from only three local governments of Numan, Demsa and Toungo. We are on Mayo-Belwa local government when this development occurred,’’ Sanda said.  Sanda said that right from the start, they were not comfortable with INEC’s handling of the inspection and had sought for more time from the tribunal to check such development.

The running mate of ACN gubernatorial candidate, Alhaji Abdulrazaq Namdaz, described the development as “unfortunate’’, insisting that the party would not be deterred in pursuing the case to its logical conclusion.

The election tribunal had in a ruling on  March 30, granted ACN a relief to inspect election materials in some wards of the 11 Local Government Areas of the State.

The ACN gubernatorial candidate, Mr Marcus Gundiri and his running mate, Alhaji Abdulrazaq Namdaz, had dragged Gov. Murtala Nyako and his deputy, Mr Bala Ngilari, INEC and two others to court, challenging the election in which Nyako was declared winner.