Three days later, anxiety is growing throughout the nation due to the protracted wait for the results of Saturday’s presidential election. The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) started results collation yesterday after attempting to address the delayed electronic transfer of results into the result viewing portal (IReV) but failing.
A minor drama broke out at the National Collation Centre in Abuja midway through the results announcement when representatives of the opposition parties staged a walkout. Over ten individuals, including senator Dino Melaye, the former governor of Imo State Emeka Ihedioha, and the national secretary of the Labor Party (LP), Umar Faruq, accused INEC chairman Prof. Mahmood Yakubu of allegedly manipulating the election in favour of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC).
As PDP agents headed by Melaye disputed the presidential election results announced for Ekiti State on Sunday, they raised the suspicion of fraud. Melaye also criticised the current process used to tally the presidential election results. Agents of LP and Action Alliance (AA) corroborated his observations.
But, Prof. Akeem Olawale Lasisi, the collation officer for Ekiti and vice chancellor of the Federal University of Health Sciences in Ila Orangun, Osun State, said that the Commission stood by that outcome.
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“I still insist that the figure presented by the state collation officer of accredited voters is 315,058. This is what is on the spreadsheet that we screened yesterday. And this is also what is on the actual result manual recorded and signed by the PDP agent and agents of other political parties back in Ekiti.
“But having said that, I’ve taken note of your observations, let us make progress. Any other figure that is at variance with this one cannot supersede the official result presented. Let’s make progress,” he stated.
After that, the INEC director announced a brief break. Melaye and other disgruntled officials demanded, however, that the INEC chairman halt collation until results from the states were posted to the INEC Results Viewing Portal when the resumed collation at 4:00 p.m. (IReV).
Yakubu, however, disagreed, claiming that nowhere in the legislation does it state that the Commission must send all of the results on IReV prior to the manual collation. He advised any party who was wronged to seek legal recourse.
Melaye claimed that the attempt by INEC to manually announce the results without the result copies from polling units uploaded online was an attempt to compromise the process in a press conference after staging a walkout. He added that the aggrieved parties were seeking the cancellation of the entire presidential election result.
Former President Olusegun Obasanjo has urged President Muhammadu Buhari and INEC chairman to urgently suspend elections that lack credibility in order to protect Nigeria from impending danger and tragedy. The country is already on edge.
The Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) and the Server for transmitting results from voting units, according to Obasanjo, were both compromised by INEC employees. In a letter to President Buhari and Yakubu from yesterday, the former president made the accusations.
Kehinde Akinyemi, Obasanjo’s special assistant on media, provided the letter to journalists in Abeokuta, the capital of Ogun State, in which he also accused electoral commission officials of rigging the results in favour of a certain candidate.
Similar to this, the National Peace Committee, whose co-chairs are Matthew Hassan Kukah, a Catholic bishop in the Sokoto Diocese, and former head of state Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar (rtd. ), has encouraged INEC to look into complaints made by Nigerians over the presidential election.
The Committee also urged INEC to take all the time necessary to provide results that would boost Nigerians’ trust and are consistent with global best practises.
The suggestions were offered by Abdulsalami yesterday in Abuja in a statement headed “A plea for calm: Please give peace and the process a chance.”
He said all citizens should be rewarded with a procedure that ensures that their votes actually count. He also reminded Nigerians that the globe has invested a lot of goodwill towards the country in the elections.
A critical assessment from international election monitors on the conduct and procedures of the election prompted the worries expressed by the former presidents.
The International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI), under the direction of Joyce Banda, a former president of Malawi, claimed that the election did not live up to Nigerians’ realistic expectations.
The 40-member delegation of the two American organisations claimed that the voting process was dominated by logistical issues and several instances of political violence, which prevented a sizable number of voters from casting their ballots.
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The Mission emphasised that team members were dispersed across the nation’s six geographical regions to witness every step of the voting process and that their observations served as the basis for the preliminary conclusions and doable suggestions to enhance future elections.
It stated: “At a critical juncture in the process, problems with electronic transmission of results and their prompt posting to a public webpage damaged residents’ faith.
“Moreover, inadequate communication and lack of transparency by INEC created confusion and eroded voters’ trust in the process. Nonetheless, the delegation maintained that despite these issues, Nigerians demonstrated their commitment to the democratic process.”
IRI and NDI claim that voters showed resiliency and a commitment to using the ballot to voice their opinions. Nonetheless, they praised INEC, claiming that for the first time in the nation’s recent history, it conducted a national election in accordance with the electoral schedule.
Saturday’s election, according to THE European Union Election Observation Mission (EU-EOM), lacked openness. The election, they claimed, was held as planned, but there was a lack of transparency during the crucial phases of the electoral process, and on election day, INEC’s credibility suffered owing to sluggish polling and information gaps from the Result Viewing Portal.
In addition to the continued gasoline and naira shortages, the Chief Observer of the EU-EOM, Andrew Barry, stated that the Commission was unable to enter several councils due to insecurity.
He said that they took notice of the fact that the amount of violence during the election lowered voter participation, calling voter suppression a severe problem for the election’s rate of inclusivity.
The PDP has urged INEC to stop using what it claims are fraudulent presidential election results. The party, through its national publicity secretary, Debo Ologunagba, briefed journalists hours after its agents withdrew from the results collation, saying: “It is clear from the votes as cast at the polling units across the country that our presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, substantially defeated the APC candidate, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu.”
It is concerning, according to the opposition party, that “INEC is complicit in the rigging and manipulation of the election results in favour of the APC by flagrant and provocative violation of the express provisions of the Electoral Act, 2022, by refusing and neglecting to transmit directly the results of the elections from the polling unit to the APC.”
Balogun Akin Osuntokun, the Director General of the Presidential Campaign Council (PCC) of the LP, has also urged that INEC halt any future results announcements and abide by its own rules. He also demanded the complete cancellation of the election so that arrangements could be immediately made for a new election that would strictly adhere to the established rules and regulations.
Osuntokun said that several violations of the INEC election conduct norms had taken place, and he added that the electoral umpire had shown a clear reluctance to correct the problem.
The APC has stated that it is optimistic following Tinubu’s victory. Dele Alake, the party’s PCC’s spokesman, warned of a covert effort by the opposition parties to get a court order delaying the proclamation of Tinubu as the victor of the presidential election during a news conference in Abuja.
The council vowed that supporters of the APC would stop at nothing to defend the mandate freely given to Tinubu to lead the country at the election, reminding those behind the plot of what happened to Justice Bassey Ikpeme, who issued the order blocking the declaration of Chief MKO Abiola as the winner of the presidential election on June 12, 1993.
