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Stakeholders of the Independent National Electoral Commission INEC have displayed disappointment in the just concluded presidential and parliamentary elections that was conducted on the 25th of February 2023. This is as a result of lack of transparency on the part of the INEC over the arrangements of the elections, logistics issues, issues with the electronic transmission of results and many others. These challenges and more agree what INEC has deliberately refused addressing the public about. 2023 presidential election: big questions INEC has failed to answer, which they still owe the public explanation up till now.
5 Big Questions INEC Has Failed to Answer
The commission owes Nigerians a large explanation regarding each of these questions.
1. BVAS crash: How did they get the results they announced?
On the day of the election on 25th February 2023 in most southern and eastern states of the country, the Bimodal Verification Authentication Systems BVAS failed to work properly. In some of the polling units that were affected, the machine couldn’t properly capture the faces of the voters, thereby making a quite reasonable amount of people not to vote.
One of the big questions INEC has failed to answer is why the machine machines were not properly serviced before being deployed to the various polling units for usage. The fault is from them for not having diagnosed the machines properly, yet they have failed to address the issue.
While the offices were having issues uploading results, another site that is not in any way owned by the commission was providing updates. One of the big questions inec has failed to answer is “who was providing the site with real-time update?”. As IRev encountered server related problems, a quite number of polling units were affected, how come the fake sites got results they uploaded.
By default, such sites should not have existed, the government should have shut down such sites for the sake of public interest.
2. Why did INEC accept results from voter intimidated areas?
There’s nothing hidden, it’s evident that a group of miscreants disrupted the peace of the election in some polling stations around the country. In states like, Lagos, Kogi, Rivers and Imo, the peace of the election was disturbed. One of the big questions INEC has failed to answer is “what happened to the military personnels that were attached to the presiding officers?” INEC was lackadaisical towards the safety of the voters.
This led to attacks on polling units by the touts, targeting the ballot boxes. Some stations had their ballot boxes carted away and nothing was done about it.
3. Rigging: Why did INEC accept rigged results despite crystal clear evidence?
It is suspicious how INEc never uttered a statement about evidence of its officers engaging in vote manipulation and all sort of electoral misconduct during the past presidential election. On twitter, evidence flooded the platform, just to notify the commission on how their officers are being manipulated by the corrupt politicians to thwart the counted votes to favour their candidate.
In Lagos state, different pictorial evidence of result sheet manipulation surfaced online, likewise the same in Rivers State.
These officers in charge of uploading the results to the servers were seen deliberately refusing to upload the original results. Some of them were seen trying to collect money from opposition parties before they could upload the results. A lot of things went wrong, yet INEC made no move to rescue the situation.
4. Why was the IREV set up by a Company without reputation?
This is an important question that INEC must answer for the sake of transparency. It is an insult to hand over the contract for building a web page for a reputable government owned commission to a company with no track record.
This finding was made public by Charles Awuzie, one of Nigeria’s best tech gurus and a cyber security specialist.
In his post on facebook, he said;
“We know who developed INEC’s result viewing portal, and I am worried….
The company contracted to build iREV doesn’t even have a website.
The company is owned by a husband and wife who are Nigerian-British citizens.
The owner of the company was born in April 1976.
The company that built iREV is kept a secret by those who never want the truth to come out.
The company’s name starts with Sh***†****
We know who built iREV, and we just want lawyers to tell us why INEC used a secret company with no track record to build such a critical platform.
I will also ask the owner of the company whose name starts with V****** to contact me and answer more questions.”
He has called out the INEC to explain to the public why they chose to use a platform without any contact or major achievement to develop the Inec Result Viewing (IREV) portal .
Read More: Obi insists on challenging the process and outcome of results from the polls
5. Why use 8 days to reconfigure what took them months to set up?
Nigerians still don’t trust INEC on the reconfiguration of the BVAS machines. Why use 8 days to reconfigure what took them months to set up? Why?. Inec claims to have spent a fortune to prepare for the elections but nothing is actually reflecting that they spend billions of Naira preparing for the conduct of the elections.
Supposing they are up to the task, all reconfigurations could have been done through the internet in the form of system update just like in mobile phones.
Manually resetting over 177,000+ BVAS machines is tasking, and this is something not just anyone can do, only professionals.
Conclusion
It is hoped that the judiciary will be transparent and be allowed to give a balancing judgement. Currently, the judiciary seems not to be truly independent. This is as a result of the past in 2019 when Hope Uzodinma who came 4th in Imo gubernatorial election, was made the Governor through the court.
The two runner ups, Peter Obi (third) and Atiku Abubakar (2nd) have vowed to challenge the electoral process which declared Tinubu the winner of the 2023 presidential election. The court process according to the law would give the mandate to the rightful winner. We hope Justice prevails.
