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General News of Friday, 10 March 2023

Source: www.mynigeria.com

APC, Labour Party, IPAC, others disagree on polls shift

INEC Chairman, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu INEC Chairman, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu

The Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, yesterday, received knocks and praises over its decision to postpone the March 11 governorship and state assembly elections to March 18.

The electoral umpire, late Wednesday night, postponed the state balloting due to its inability to commence the reconfiguration of the Bimodal Voters Accreditation System, BVAS, machines, on time.

The Court of Appeal, on Wednesday, gave the commission the nod to reconfigure the BVAS used for the February 25 Presidential and National Assembly polls in readiness for the state elections. Shortly after getting the court’s nod, the INEC management went into a meeting after which it postponed the governorship polls to enable it to reconfigure the over 176,000 BVAS machines which would require five days to do.

The postponement elicited mixed views in the polity.

The Labour Party, LP, said INEC’s handling of the presidential poll had eroded its confidence in the electoral umpire, which it said could no longer be trusted.

Political parties in the country, under the aegis of the Inter-Party Advisory Council, IPAC, while supporting the postponement however warned that the electorate will no longer accept excuses for poor performance.

This was as Deputy Speaker of the Oyo State House of Assembly, Abiodun Fadeyi; and Nigeria’s former envoy to the Philippines, Dr Yemi Farounbi, said the postponement of the polls was inevitable considering that INEC had to reconfigure the BVAS for the elections.

This INEC can no longer be trusted — LP

The Labour Party said the recent conduct of the INEC had done incalculable damage to the trust Nigerians once had in the commission’s promise to let the people’s vote count.

National Chairman of the party, Comrade Julius Abure, said this in an interview in Abuja, yesterday.

He explained that he was one of those who at various fora expressed implicit confidence in the ability of the Prof. Mahmood Yakubu-led INEC to deliver based on his repeated assurances that the commission would adhere strictly to its rules and the tamper-proof BVAS technology.

According to Abure, INEC not only failed to deliver but had through its subsequent actions shown that it cannot be trusted.

The LP Chairman expressed 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.

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."



FI