The Peoples Democratic Party and its presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, have withdrawn an application they filed to compel the Independent National Electoral Commission to allow their agents to participate in the process of sorting out ballot papers that were used for the February 25 presidential election.
Both the PDP and Atiku, who is separately challenging the outcome of the election that was declared in favour of Bola Tinubu, the candidate of the ruling All Progressives Congress, told the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal, sitting at the Court of Appeal in Abuja, that they have deemed it fit to discontinue the application.
When the motion ex-parte, marked: CA/PEC/10M/2023, was brought up for hearing on Wednesday, Atiku, via his team of attorneys headed by Joe Kyari Gadzama, informed the court that he filed a notice of discontinuance.
After this, Judge Joseph Ikyegh-led three-member panel knocked down the application.
A member of Atiku’s legal team, who did not want his name publicized, stated that the decision to withdraw the application was a product of a meeting his legal team conducted with the head of the electoral board on Tuesday.
He said originally the suit was filed because of problems and procedural bottlenecks they experienced at the INEC headquarters when they desired access to the election materials as authorized by the court.
“However, before the application which was dated March 13 could be listed for hearing, INEC, on its own, invited our legal team for a meeting.
“It was at that meeting which happened yesterday (Tuesday) that all the grey areas were resolved, with INEC committing to enable our agents to monitor the process of sorting out some of the election materials we sought, notably the vote sheets.
“Since that was largely our plea in the new application we submitted, we thought that it would not be necessary to continue with the hearing. Consequently, to save court time, we filed a notice of discontinuance which was accordingly granted.”
