By Lucy Caulkett-
The Nigerian Labour Party Chairman has attacked INEC’s credibility and exposed misgivings over INEC’s various applications to court, reliefs sought, and the postponement of the Governorship and State Assembly elections earlier scheduled for Saturday, March 11, 2023.
Julius Abure(pictured) went on a frontal attack against INEC over its conduct of the Nigerian presidential elections, practically accusing the election body of dishonesty and lack of credibility and integrity over its handling of the elections.
The integrity of the Nigerian elections has been a subject of debate in Nigeria and abroad, but most international observers have concluded the process to have been both incompetent and corrupt.
INEC had promised fair and transparent elections, but fallen short of being perceived to be either fair or transparent . The Labour Party’s Peter Obi has instituted court proceedings to challenge the election results, as Nigerians and the world wait to see the outcome.
Obi has experience in winning court cases challenging political rulings, but no party in Nigeria’s history ahs ever successfully had a Nigerian election result overturned.
The failings of INEC do not prove the eventual declaration of Abubakar Tinubu as being illegitimate or rigged. Many individuals particularly the Labour Party and the PDP disagree
INEC has been widely criticised for its inept conduct of last Saturday’s elections in which it breach electoral rules by failing to upload election results immediately in order to maintain a reasonable level of transparency in its running of the elections. The electoral body said its server had been compromised by a cyber attack.
Abure spoke to journalists from the Nigerian Vanguard Newspaper, expressing strong disapproval of the way INEC conducted its elections.
Abure said: “Our major concern is that aspect (of the Appeal Court ruling) which granted INEC the opportunity not to allow us to inspect the BVAS. Our concern really stems from the fact that INEC these days is not to be trusted. INEC will make a promise from one side of the mouth and then swallow their vomit from the other.
He continued: “recall that in 2019, INEC promised that it had a server only for those servers not to be available when litigants wanted to inspect the server that they claimed they had.
“INEC had gone out of their way to assure and reassure Nigerians again and again that election results will be uploaded from polling units to their server and that people are going to view these results from their server but you could see that when it was time for people to start uploading the results, INEC said it had a technical glitch even when they had explained to Nigerians that they had backup that will roll off into work immediately when the main server had a technical issue.
“All of these bring us to the point that even though INEC had assured us and the courts in their counter affidavits that the records in the BVAS will be saved in their backend server we have our doubts because this is not the first time INEC will be telling us that they have a server, they will upload to their server and so on and so forth.
“But the Court in their wisdom has given them privilege and you can see, immediately they got that judgment, they shifted the elections.
“If they knew they were going to postpone the governorship election for a week why did they go to court to vary the order given to us to inspect materials?
“There was absolutely no need for it because one of the reasons they gave to the court was that if they allowed us to inspect the BVAS it would affect the timeline for the election but surprisingly, after getting the court to grant them the request to reconfigure the BVAS they immediately shifted the election.
“One had a lot of doubts about the patriotism, commitment, truthfulness and integrity of this INEC to do what is right.
“The way and manner they conducted the last election has completely destroyed the confidence which I had in INEC. Let’s see what stories they will come up with tomorrow.
“Tomorrow is here it’s not far. Since the court gave the order for INEC to allow us inspect materials, INEC has not allowed us.
“We have not been able to inspect, our lawyers have been going there every day, our technical experts have been going there on daily basis and we have not been allowed access.
“At times you begin to wonder whether this INEC is working for Nigerians or some persons somewhere.
“I will be sincere with you, if INEC says they are going to Lagos, I will go and look for them in Sokoto.”
Many interested parties and politicians have warned INEC not to repeat the shambles which occurred during the elections in the gubernatorial elections.
Suspicions that corrupt politicians bribed INEC officials to alter the election outcomes are deep, and have led many Nigerians to question the election result, while many Nigerians believe the elections results to have been fair and representative of the wishes of Nigeria’s wide population.
A number of INEC officials have claimed no election took place in their wards, raising suspicion of corruption, but without any solid evidence to support allegations in the overall elections.
The Peoples Democratic Party has also demanded that the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, Prof. Mahmoud Yakubu, resign for violation of the provisions of the Electoral Act and alleged manipulation and alteration of the February 25 presidential election results.
The PDP also called for the Inspector General of Police and the Director General of the Directorate of State Services immediately commence investigations into the electoral violations and manipulations by INEC with the view to prosecuting Yakubu and other INEC officials for electoral offences.