Laolu Akande, media aide to the former Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo, has said that the failure of the Independent National Electoral Commission to electronically transmit the results of the last presidential and National Assembly elections has broken the trust of Nigerians in the electoral body.
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Akande made the statement on Friday while appearing on Channels Television’s ‘Politics Today’ programme.
The media aide noted that despite INEC making the calls ahead of the February elections, it failed to stand on its assurance to upload polling unit results on the INEC Result Viewing Portal.
He said, “It is important to establish something we cannot basically run away from. INEC came out of this election as a damaged good. There is no doubt about that. INEC itself set up a standard. INEC determined the guidelines. INEC committed to the people of Nigeria that this is how we are going to declare the result of the election.
“In fact, the Chairman of INEC went abroad and said, ‘What we are going to do is that this results, when we get it, we would put it on our IReV in real-time’.”
The Presidential Election Petitions Tribunal had on Wednesday, September 6, upheld the election of President Bola Tinubu as the winner of the February 25 presidential poll.
The five-member panel, headed by Justice Haruna Tsammani, mentioned among other reasons, that the sole technological requirement mandated for use by the INEC during elections is the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System.
The panel, however, maintained that the Electoral Act 2022 does not contain a mandatory provision for the electronic transmission of election results.
Owing to this, Akande said, “Now guess what? When it was time for INEC to fulfill its own guidelines – for certain reasons, we could talk about that- INEC failed to do what it said it would do. Now it is right that if you look at the law, and I think the judges also have affirmed that INEC has not really broken the law. But INEC has broken the trust of the Nigerian people.”
Akande stated that “it’s a problem for political legitimacy for people that came out of that system,” adding that INEC set itself up but couldn’t deliver its promise.
The aide added that owing to the act of the electoral body, “there is a lot of distrust. INEC is responsible for that.”
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