The Presidential Election Petition Court has struck out the testimony of a star witness of the Labour Party and Peter Obi, Clarita Ogar, who claimed to be an employee of Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Ogar had testified and tendered a report claiming that there was no glitch in the the cloud services which hosted INEC l-rev servers for the 2023 Presidential Election, which could have created technical issues for uploads of election results.
Delivering judgement in the petition, Justice Haruna Tsammani held that the report submitted to back up the claims were downloaded from the internet and not an originally produced document of the witness.
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The court also found the witness to be an interested party having admitted to contesting for a House of Representatives seat on the platform of the Labour Party.
Ogar was one of the 10 witnesses whose witness statements and submissions were thrown out by the court.
The court also noted that the witness statement of Ogar was not filed at the time the petition was filed as mandatorily provided for in paragraphs 4 (5d) of the 1st Schedule to the Electoral Act 2022
Nine other witnesses of Peter Obi and his Labour Party suffered similar fate. Obi’s lawyers had claimed that the witnesses were subpoenaed witnesses whose statements do not need to be front loaded like that of regular witnesses, an argument the court held was misconceived and anchored on an old Electoral law.
Obi had called a total of 13 witnesses after earlier indicating that he will call 50.
By the courts judgment, 10 of the 13 witnesses have been deemed incompetent and their testimonies dismissed.
