Obi is accusing INEC of deceiving Nigerians with its report of the 2023 poll that was released on Friday.
In a 526-page report, the electoral agency laboured to explain why the IREV failed to upload the presidential results despite the seamless working of the bimodal voter accreditation system (BVAS).
INEC is attributing the challenge to technical glitches, which it says did not in any way affect the credibility of the controversial elections.
But, the Spokesman for the Obi-Datti Campaign Council, Yunusa Tanko, described the report as medicine after death.
“I think the INEC report is about medicine after death. The truth about it is that if I didn’t mean that INEC actually dealt with this issue as it happened during the election, possibly Nigerians will have believed and trusted this particular report.
“But here we are, the report of the INEC which signifies that the IREV refused to function or was uploaded during the election is false. Considering the fact that there were three elections that happened on that day, the Federal House of Representatives, the Senate, and the result was uploaded and there was no issue.
“Why must there be an issue with regard to the presidential election? So totally for us is deceit, disdain for the people and is trying to promote an indecency”, says the Obi-Datti Campaign Council spokesman.
He notes that unfortunately everyone knew when INEC gave a written document, citing that they would not agree with any result that is not posted on the IREV.
“It is documented and everybody saw it. But then this is the same INEC who went again to the Supreme Court citing that they had an authority to collate the result manually and it was stamped on authority on illegality by our judiciary.
“And you want to convince me that that particular issue of glitch was not done deliberately? The truth is that nobody was arrested. Somebody ought to have been arrested who has been saddled with that responsibility.
“And if he is saddled with the responsibility, he must be held responsible and account for why the glitches occur.
“And even if there was a glitch, it’s just like your network taking off. It shouldn’t take up to a whole day. A few seconds it is off, three seconds it is back. Why was the server not back or why is the glitch not resolved?
“So for me and many of us, this is totally unacceptable. The report is deceitful to the Nigerian people. Our electoral Act and electoral law must be revisited to give clarity as regard to the process of our election.
“We don’t want to give any lacuna to any of our election process and give room for the judiciary only to decide who wins election. Election should be done and dusted at the polling units”, the Obi-Datti Campaign Council adds.
Interestingly, Obi, last March, challenged INEC, to explain why the commission uploaded the results of the national assembly poll results but refused to upload the result of the presidential election held the same day.
Obi threw the challenge while featuring on a national television, Arise. He said it was very strange and curious for the electoral umpire to upload the poll results of the national assembly poll through its Bi-modal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS)machines, but failed to do the same for the presidential poll held at the same time.
He, unequivocally accused INEC of deliberately creating confusion to subvert the will of the people, pointing out that he had no personal issue with the candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Bola Tinubu who INEC declared winner of the exercise but was only challenging the process through which he purportedly emerged.
On its part, INEC last April, asked the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC) to dismiss a petition filed by Labour Party and its presidential candidate, Peter Obi, saying the reliefs sought were not grantable.
INEC, the 1st respondent, said so in its reply filed at the PEPC’s Secretariat by its lawyer, Abubakar Mahmoud, SAN, in Abuja.
The electoral commission prayed the court to either “dismiss or strike out the petition for being grossly incompetent, abusive, vague, nebulous, generic, general, non-specific, ambiguous, equivocal, hypothetical and academic.”
Obi, the first petitioner, and Labour Party, the second petitioner, sued INEC, Tinubu, Kashim Shettima and APC as first to fourth respondents respectively.
The petitioners were seeking the nullification of the election victory of Tinubu and Shettima in the previous February 25 presidential poll.
Tinubu, according to INEC, defeated 17 other presidential candidates who took part in the election, scoring a total of 8,794,726 votes, the highest of all the candidates.
While former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar of Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) came second with 6,984,520 votes in the poll; Obi came third with 6,101,533 votes.
INEC argued that while Shettima, the vice president, was duly nominated and sponsored to contest the election, it also added that Tinubu and Shettima were duly declared and returned as elected and issued Certificates of Return having fulfilled the requirements of the constitution to be declared winners and returned.
Intriguing again, last September, PEPT, that is, the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal, declared that INEC was not under any form of obligation to transmit election results electronically.
Justice Haruna Tsamani led presidential election petition tribunal while ruling on the petition filed by the presidential candidate of the Labour Party, Peter Obi challenging President Tinubu’s victory ruled that there was nowhere in law where INEC was only required to transmit results by electronic means.
The tribunal said the electoral umpire is at will to decide the means it deem fit to transmit election results. It further held that there is no requirement for INEC to electronically transmit the results of the election.
But in July 2019, INEC Chairman, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, clarified why the commission could not transmit the results of the 2019 general elections electronically.
Yakubu made the clarification in a video played by lawyer to former President Muhammadu Buhari, Alex Izinyon, SAN, before the PEPT.
The INEC chief said his commission could not transmit results electronically, because of inadequate communication facilities and/or coverage in the country and the challenge of cyber-security.
Izinyon, thereafter, tendered the digital video disc (DVD) which contained the interview granted by Yakubu to a private television station, in which he gave details of the challenges of transmitting results electronically.
The DVD was admitted as Exhibit: P85, while the certificate of compliance, tendered with it, was admitted as Exhibit: P86.
The video was tendered as a counter evidence against a contrary to claim by the PDP and its presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, about a server wherein INEC collated results.
Atiku/PDP were challenging the outcome of the last presidential election on the basis of the server and other related evidence.
The petitioners were claiming to have won the election by virtue of some results they got from the server.
Yet, at the end of July 2021, the same INEC Chairman, Mahmood Yakubu, said “in Nigeria, we are convinced that the use of appropriate technology is one of the best guarantees for the transparency and credibility of the electoral process.”
He told a visiting delegation of the Electoral Commission of Liberia in Abuja, boasting that INEC has since introduced electronic registration and voting.
INEC, according to Yakubu, has also given assurance on its capacity to transmit poll results electronically, after successfully piloting the system in the last two governorship elections.
But against popular expectations, the seemingly self-serving National Assembly in a controversial move voted against electronic transmission of poll results. It instead requires INEC to obtain prior approval from the Assembly, against provisions of the Constitution.
The federal legislators had an opportunity to redeem themselves when the bicameral Legislature met in a Joint Committee session to harmonise the Electoral Act Amendment Bill 2021.
The long-delayed legislation was expected to be applied in last year’s polls. For certain unexplained reasons, it appeared INEC bungled the electoral process despite the fact that in 2018, it hosted in Abuja, a well-attended international conference on the use of technology in elections, which recommended improvements to electoral integrity.
