Dele Farotimi, a former spokesperson for the Labour Party (LP) Presidential Campaign Council for the 2023 election, claims that everything ran smoothly during the election on February 25 with the exception of INEC.
“Everything that should have worked on that day worked, except INEC,” he stated on Channels Television’s Politics Today programme on Wednesday. “All the evidences are very clear and it showed very clearly that.” “The integrity of INEC as an institution went into exile.”
Festus Okoye, the INEC spokesman, had cited a “technical glitch” as the reason why the Bimodal Voter Registration Systems (BVAS) had been unable to instantly send the results of the presidential election to the commission’s Result Viewing Portal (IReV).
In his reply, Okoye claimed that the IReV portal was functional for the elections for the National Assembly, Governorship, and State Assemblies.
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IReV and BVAS are new technologies that the electoral body introduced for the accreditation and electronic transmission of votes for this year’s elections, but Nigerians were unable to view the results of the presidential election in real-time before the electoral umpire declared Bola Tinubu, a former governor of Lagos State and then the candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), as the victor of the hotly contested election.
On Wednesday, Farotimi, a supporter of Peter Obi of the Labour Party, who finished third in the poll, claimed that Okoye ought to have apologised to Nigerians for the electoral umpire’s failure to keep its pledge to transmit election results electronically to everyone who cast a ballot.
He asserted that Okoye’s explanation of the technological issue that marred the presidential election on February 25 was inconsistent with common sense and that INEC “deliberately sabotaged” the procedure.
He said, “INEC is a public body established by law and bound to work according to the law. It advertised its guidelines…the advertisement of BVAS and IReV and everything. INEC was quite vociferous in explaining to Nigerians and assuring us of what would happen with the system.”
“Mr. Festus Okoye should have resigned or be someplace drafting a statement explaining to Nigerians what transpired in a normal environment where people are still controlled by reason. Glitch? Is there a problem with the human brain? A technical malfunction or a problem brought on by the total shutdown of human conscience, asked the leader of the Labour Party.
