The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) on Thursday denied any deliberate attempt to waste taxpayers money following its inability to upload all results of the February 25 presidential election on its Result Viewing Portal (iReV).
This denial from the commission comes following statements of admission made by INEC Chairman Mahmood Yakubu in March that there were indeed glitches in the transfer of presidential and National Assembly results into the iReV portal.
However, Festus Okoye, INEC spokesman speaking as a guest on Channels Television’s Politics Today programme, said it is wrong to accuse INEC of wasting taxpayers money in the 2023 general elections on account of the technical “glitches” experienced during the transfer of results.
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He explained that the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) was successfully used for voter accreditation and result upload for the polls.
“We are only talking about result uploads for the presidential election only. It is not true or correct to insinuate even remotely that taxpayers’ money was wasted and the machine did not work,” Okoye said.
He admitted earlier that there were glitches in the upload of results, but it wasn’t sufficient to throw away the successes gained as a result of the BVAS application nationwide.
Okoye admitted that the commission had identified some of the shortcomings from the 2023 general elections, but urged Nigerians not to judge the electoral body as a result of the challenge the commission experienced in uploading the presidential election.
“It is not fair to judge the entire performance of the commission on the basis of a glitch in the result upload for the presidential election,” he said.
The INEC commissioner added during the course of the interview that political parties had been empowered by the electoral laws to know what goes on at the polling units.
“Almost all the political parties nominated and accredited at least over 170,000 polling agents. What that means is that they had primary evidence of the results from the polling units.
“It is those results from the polling units, together with the BVAS as a machine itself, that goes to the collation centre. So, it is not true for a political party to rely only on result uploads in order to get the evidence with which it wants to prosecute its case in court,” he added.
