Nigeria’s Minister of Information, Lai Mohammed, has said that the 2023 elections were the freest and most authentic the country ever conducted.
Development Diaries reports that the minister said this while briefing journalists after the Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting on Wednesday in Abuja, the nation’s capital.
‘I went to the U.S. to balance the skewed report about the just concluded elections; and everywhere I went, I said very unambiguously that the last general elections in Nigeria are the most transparent’, he said.
‘It was the freest and the most authentic Nigeria had ever held, and that is despite the effort of the opposition to delegitimise the election’.
One of the reasons the minister gave to back up his statement was the use of technology in the elections.
‘The introduction of technology, especially, the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System(BVAS), made it pretty difficult for anybody to do the usual things before like over-voting, stuffing of ballot boxes and the likes because once it takes your biometrics; you cannot vote twice.’, he said.
In light of the events that were reported during the elections, Mohammed’s comments can only be described as a political statement, not factual.
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) had promised to make use of the BVAS for real-time transmission of results during the elections.
However, that did not happen as the commission allowed the transmission of results manually, which raised concerns over election transparency.
Many election observers condemned the polls over widespread violence and electoral irregularities that accompanied the process.
Development Diaries had reported that generally, logistics challenges, overvoting, voter inducement, delay in uploading results from polling units to the INEC portal, and violence were observed during the polls.
The African Union (AU) observer group also expressed concerns over the delay in the commencement of voting in the February 25 election.
As for the European Union (EU), it said lack of transparency and operational failures marred the presidential and National Assembly elections.
Situation Room, for its part, reported that the elections were marred by poor organisation, severe logistical and operational failure.
In fact, the Rule of Law and Accountability Advocacy Centre (RULAAC), described the conduct of the 2023 federal elections as ‘blatantly violent, manipulated and subverted’, as compared to previous elections.
Another election observer, Yiaga Africa, reported that the results announced by INEC were manipulated.
Similarly, the Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD) said that violence undermined the improved conduct of the polls.
Overall, a combination of violence, vote buying, online and offline intimidation of voters, disinformation and decreased citizens’ trust in INEC was recorded before, during and after the elections.
Development Diaries, therefore, believes that the minister’s comments on the credibility of the elections are questionable and call on him to retract them.
Photo source: Fed Min of Info and Culture
