There have been several calls for the Judiciary to sit and decide the true winner of the 2023 Presidential election before the inauguration of the President-elect on May 29th.
The Senior Advocate of Nigeria, Femi Falana has also shared his opinion on the matter. The Legal eagle speaking in an interview with Arise Tv news explained that the two major things the court need is the reports from IReV and the BVAS.
He clarified that the petition doesn’t have to last for six months as stipulated in the constitution. He argued that when this laws were set up, nobody knew that the BVAS technology and the electronic transmission of results will occur.
According to him, Nigeria will have to replicate what Ghana and Kenya had done in settling their election matters before the inauguration. He stated clearly that there is a need for a reform and for election petitions to be taken directly to the Supreme Court.
He said, ”In most other African countries, you have a constitutional court, this petition goes straight to the constitutional court. And this court takes only 14 days to conclude the operations. At the time the constitution provided for 6 months, nobody knew we are going to have the use of a BVAS machine or transmission of election results to the central server of IReV.
For me, if you have the report of the BVAS Machine that has captured the election and the results that have been uploaded to the IReV. If you have those two, the election petition can be decided in 14 days. It doesn’t have to last for six months.”
