Peter Obi, the Labour Party’s candidate in the 2023 presidential election, has criticized the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) for misleading Nigerians with its recently released election report.
The report, a comprehensive 526-page document, was published just before the first anniversary of the election and detailed why the IREV failed to upload the presidential results, despite the successful operation of the bimodal voter accreditation system (BVAS).
INEC attributed the failure to an “HTTP error” caused by a configuration bug, discovered only after the presiding officers at the polling units were able to upload the results of the national assembly elections.
In a conversation with Daily Trust, Obi, represented by Yunusa Tanko, the Chief Spokesperson of the Obi-Datti Campaign Committee, dismissed the report as too little, too late. He argued that INEC’s claim of IReV malfunctioning was untrue, pointing out that on the day of the election, three separate elections took place, and only the presidential result failed to upload.
Obi expressed his disappointment, noting that INEC had previously issued a written statement declaring they would not accept any result not posted on the IREV. He called the report a deception to Nigerians and emphasized the need to review the electoral act and law to ensure transparency in the election process.
Obi stated, “The INEC report is a case of too little, too late. If INEC had addressed this issue as it occurred during the election, Nigerians might have had more faith in this report. However, the claim that the IREV failed to function or upload during the election is false. There were three elections that day – the Federal House of Representatives, the Senate, and all results were uploaded without any issues. So why was there a problem with the presidential election? This is nothing but deceit and disrespect for the people.”
He further criticized INEC for its appeal to the Supreme Court, where it argued for the authority to manually collate the result, a move he described as stamping authority on illegality. He questioned the absence of any arrests following the glitch and called for accountability from those responsible.
Obi concluded, “This report is a deception to the Nigerian people. We must revisit our electoral act and law to clarify our election process. We cannot leave any gaps in our election process that would allow only the judiciary to decide the election outcome. Elections should be concluded at the polling units.”
