Obi presents software engineer as witness against Tinubu at tribunal

The Labour Party presidential candidate, Peter Obi, has presented a software engineer as a witness in a case he filed to challenge the victory of President Bola Tinubu at the Presidential Election Petition Courtion (PEPC).

The engineer, who identified himself as Anthony Chinwo, gave his evidence as the second petitioners' witness on Thursday, June 8, 2023.

Though he told the court that he has adequate knowledge of the operation of back-end servers, Chinwo equally stated that he was not familiar with the application of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) deployed by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) for the general elections.

While being cross-examined, the witness, who also identified himself as an architect, told the court that he didn't feature in any key role during the presidential election.

The software engineer also admitted that Amazon Web Services, AWS, deployed by INEC for the general elections remains one of the most-trusted Cloud Computer Services providers with 99.9% security assurance.

“However, deployment of AWS is one thing, but utilizing it is something else,” he added.

Asked how he gathered information on the election, which he analysed, the witness, said, “My lords, I used publicly available INEC Application Programming Interface, API, to conduct analysis of the election.

“I used them to collect all the information that was available on the election. I did it over time during the period of the election.”

The engineer cum architect maintained that INEC erred by failing to upload real-time data from the polling unit to its server, even though he also admitted that he was unable to vote on the election, nor was he staff of Amazon.

Asked if he knew the number of software that INEC deployed for the conduct of the election, the witness, said: “I am not a staff of INEC, so I am not in a position to know the number of softwares that made the component of the softwares that INEC used for the 2023 election.”

Chinwo was subsequently discharged from the witness box as the Justice Haruna Tsammani-led five-member panel proceeded to admit in evidence, four INEC’s Forms EC40G from Bayelsa state, which Obi tendered through a member of his legal team, Patrick Ikweto, SAN.