By EMMANUEL OGEBE

I postponed my departure from Abuja to attend what was arguably the hottest show in town – the cross examination of Labour Party’s bombshell expert witness who said there was no glitch on Amazon’s 33 servers worldwide as claimed by Nigerian election officials.

On the National Network news the night before, there was simply no mention of this stunning evidence by PW7. I was shocked by how bad media censorship had become in Nigeria.

Even 30 years ago when a High Court judge, Hon Justice Dolapo Akinsanya, courageously ruled that the Interim National Government was illegal, the only court judgment in Nigerian history that nullified a serving federal government,

Nigeria’s NTA network reported the news.

Although veiled, the newscaster said: “The Interim National Government has vowed to appeal against a judgment delivered by a high court against it today.”

She didn’t state what the judgment was but we all knew the omitted context. If NTA could report that then, why wouldn’t they report the mere testimony that INEC’s claimed server glitch was proven false by Amazon reports? Clearly they understood the damning implications.

I was determined to see for myself the outcome knowing that it might again be blacked out in the news as friends had told me was consistently the case since the election trial began.

The testimony of PW7 was damaging and the adjournment for a day before her cross examination was even more so. This is the classic strategy of lawyers in western jury trials to leave lingering on jurors’ minds the last witness’s testimony for a long time.

It was a gamble If that was LP’s lawyers’ strategy (although Nigeria is a non-jury country) because it always buys time for the opposing counsel to fully weaponize their counter offensive cross examination.

On Tuesday, June 20, PW7 walked into the courtroom dressed in Ankara giving away a little that this Nigerian American had some ties and identification to her roots unlike her western business professional couture of the day before. But she was walking into a minefield boobytrapped by dozens of heavily-financed lawyers.

We exchanged pleasantries and I got a slight sense of diffidence – or defensiveness (the latter likely because she had probably been prepped for pending fireworks so today was the harder part of play.)

And, boy, was it tough!

INEC’s lawyer Mahmoud, SAN valiantly but unsuccessfully tried to chink her armor as an expert witness by citing a missed item in her listing of project development circle. She was unruffled.

Having effectively survived INEC’s onslaught, Tinubu’s team took her on.

Under cross examination, she admitted that she was an LP supporter who contested in the same election but that she had disclosed that in her affidavit.

Apart from queries about her presence in court on several occasions prior (which witnesses are not supposed to do) and a veiled reference to her Twitter handle’s posts, Olanipeku SAN went in for the kill. He read from an affidavit she’d filed in her personal NASS election petition in which she said that she tried but failed to upload her documents to INEC because of a network failure!

This was epic cross examination.

Many years ago, I was listed as a fact witness against Gen. Abdusalaami in the US human rights litigation by the Abiola family and Enahoro et al in Chicago.

Some years later I was then called to testify as law expert witness in the same case. I ultimately withdrew from active involvement in the case because I could see the potential conflict. If I was listed as fact witness who was also a torture victim of the military regime, how could I reincarnate as expert and not allow my testimony to jaundiced by the prior animus?

The witness kept her head quite alright but the oppo research on her dinged her credibility as an expert witness by impeaching her neutrality. To find that much on her within 24 hours in Nigeria’s archaic legal system where there are no online court databases, I can only suspect that someone betrayed her to APC. Her LP affidavit was reportedly sworn to on June 19 the same day she testified but APC’s legal team already had her affidavit from her NASS petition in Cross River state by the next day. This was nothing short of a Naija miracle!

In my view, the most significant part of the cross examination was that prior affidavit in which she claimed that her submission didn’t upload to INEC because of a network failure.

However, a network failure on her internet provider is not the same as a glitch on INEC’s server.

Besides, INEC only claimed a glitch on February 25 and not on the day she complained of network failure.

Thirdly and more damningly, INEC’s “glitch” was only for Presidential results and not for NASS results on the same date, time and place which is utterly impossible!

(My interview afterwards with one of the techies who data-mined election results elicited the claim that, “There is a guy who used AI to analyse the data.”

He confirmed that Tinubu and Atiku didn’t score 25% in more than 12 states, including Abuja and that only PO scored 25% in 25 states and Abuja.” He further opined that when INEC saw this trend, they immediately intentionally interrupted the system upload then feigned disruption by glitch.)

Fourthly, PW77 admitted not having access to INEC’s password so clearly she won’t have the same sort of capacity to upload to INEC as INEC staff would.

Fifthly the nature of her upload is different from the type of upload by INEC’s staff. While she may have been uploading from her laptop, INEC staff were uploading from the BVAS which was an integrated system tool.

Frankly, my team of three legal observers from Washington, Lagos and Abuja agreed LP lawyers should have vetted her and selected someone else with less baggage. There are numerous Nigerians in Diaspora with Amazon Cloud engineer expertise who did not vie for election under LP.

Nevertheless, PW7 held her own. The fact remains that the six health status dashboard results showed no glitch and she said these were publicly accessible reports which can be obtained by anyone. That remained sacrosanct despite the barrage of attacks.

Indeed Fagbemi SAN, the third round of cross examination to assail her, claimed there was an AWS glitch in September 2021 to which PW7 replied “the last glitch on AWS was in December 2021” thus solidifying the central thesis of her testimony even more!

At the end of it all, it is now incumbent upon the respondents to adduce their own evidence showing documented server failure on February 25, 2023.

The significance of this testimony is that it casts INEC’s glitch as force minor (act of man) and not act of God. This bolsters the accusations that INEC acted mala fide (in bad faith) and not bona fide (good faith.)

But what we now know about PW7, who I now rename PW 007 as the James Bond Girl who sent shockwaves into the trial, is that she’s a highly intelligent and consummate professional who withstood withering attacks by top notch lawyers and a patriot who returned from Diaspora (and a highly lucrative profession) to serve her people politically.

She knew the risk of bringing her expertise to bear but she courageously stuck her neck into the fray. She joins a pantheon of witnesses for both LP and PDP who took that risk to defy a corrupt and ruthless system.

For all the fossilization of Nigeria’s practice, I must admit that this was one of the most melodramatic cross examinations I have ever witnessed.

I wish Nigerians had had the privilege to watch it in live broadcast but unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge, there is no historical live recording of what transpired even by the court. And that is a loss to the public and even the profession.

At the end, even veteran election litigator Wole Olanipekun mellowed down and in his final questions to PW007 coyly asked, “who is the president of America?” To which she answered, “Joe Biden.”

The impending defense of the election will be interesting. I hope the court will allow broadcast of the closing addresses and the verdict thereafter as first done by the presidential election tribunal of 2007. Nigerians deserve greater transparency in the judicial determination of their leadership choice than INEC has availed them.

•EDITOR’S NOTE: The first part of this piece entitled, “Day LP’s witness dropped a bombshell at Presidential Election Tribunal”, was published yesterday. Emmanuel Ogebe, Esq, is a prominent US-based international human rights lawyer and Nigeria pro-democracy advocate with the US NIGERIA LAW GROUP in Washington. This month, he marked the 27^th anniversary of his abduction and torture by late Gen. Sani Abacha for demanding an investigation of the assassination of pro-democracy icon Kudirat Abiola over the June 12 election annulment. His advocacy led to the naming of Kudirat corner by Nigeria house in New York, the US designation of Boko Haram as a foreign terrorist organization and International Criminal Court Prosecutor’s determination of crimes against humanity in Nigeria amongst others.

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