The slow upload of the presidential and National Assembly election results to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) portal has left many Nigerians worried.
Development Diaries reports that as at 6:23am on Sunday, 26, February, results from only 18,317 polling units out of 176,846 had been uploaded to the INEC result portal.
Millions of Nigerians had trooped out to elect the successor to President Muhammadu Buhari and federal lawmakers on Saturday, 25 February.
Before the polls opened, INEC had promised to start uploading results from polling units to the portal as soon as counting ended.
However, almost 24 hours after voting ended, scanty results of the polls had been uploaded, raising concerns over election transparency.
In a statement by its Commissioner for Voter Education, Festus Okoye, INEC said it was aware of the challenges and blamed technical hitches.
The commission allayed fears that the portal was compromised, saying the portal remained secure.
‘Our technical team is working assiduously to solve all the outstanding problems, and users of the IReV would have noticed improvements since last night [Saturday]’, he said.
Several reports from observers also indicated that in states like Ekiti, Cross River, Imo, and Rivers, INEC had their local government area (LGA) collation centres relocated without adequate information to stakeholders.
‘In Ekiti especially, we have it on good authority that all LGA collation centres were relocated, and in most cases, accredited observers were outrightly denied access to where results were being collated’, Chief Executive of Connected Development (CODE), Hamzat Lawal, said on behalf of a coalition of civil society organisations (CSO) that monitored the polls.
‘This happened in Oru East, Imo State, where our observers confirmed that no election was held and in fact, some voters were asked to vote in a private residential building of a party chieftain, which is clearly against INEC guidelines and the electoral act.
‘Yet we have results from that LGA. This is an indictment on INEC and all that our constitution stands for’.
The Chairman of INEC, Mahmood Yakubu, had written to Nigerians ahead of the 2023 general election reiterating the commission’s commitment to free, fair and credible polls.
In fact, he pledged total loyalty of the commission to Nigerians who want free, fair, credible and verifiable elections supported by technology, which guarantees transparent accreditation and upload of polling unit results for citizens to view in real-time on election day.
That promise has been broken, and Development Diaries believes that the gaps and unpreparedness within the structure of the electoral process threaten the credibility of the elections.
We, therefore, call on INEC to address these issues immediately.
Photo source: INEC
