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ν INEC flouted Electoral Act –Ahamba
ν Failure to transmit result not enough to void election – Sagay, RCDA
From Juliana Taiwo-Obalonye, Abuja,Vincent Kalu, Lagos, and Stanley Uzoaru, Owerri
The Transition Monitoring Group (TMG) which deployed 774 roving observers across the 774 local government areas in the country in the February 25th presidential and legislative election in Nigeria, has declared that the result of the presidential poll was manipulated.
In a statement by its Chairman, Auwal Ibrahim Musa Rafsanjani, TMG, a foremost independent civil society election observation organization in Nigeria with 400 strong membership, said that it conducted its activities strictly in line with the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) guidelines as well as other laws of the land and collaborated closely with other domestic and international observers to observe the polls.
It particularly noted that the disparity in the credibility level of the National Assembly elections where incumbent governors and serving members of parliament contested and lost across political parties and across the country from that of the presidential election points further to the efficacy of the system when applied as it should be.
“TMG believes this to be a direct manipulation of outcome of the presidential election than that of the legislative election.” The group said further: “The overall outcome of the election has not been of much surprise to TMG as it has observed most of the shenanigans played out during the pre-election phase. The lack of internal democracy in the political party processes that produced the candidates of major parties has had a direct bearing on the general election.
“The procurement of party candidacy at the primaries through vote-buying resurfaced in the general election. The violence that accompanied the campaign periods in some parts of the country transcended into electoral violence in a number of places during the presidential election.”
The group concluded by saying: “TMG is unambiguously disappointed with the poor conduct of the 2023 Presidential and Legislative election, especially the insistence of the commission to jettison immediate result transmission from the polling unit. This singular act has given room for too much human interference and manipulation of results and truncated the will of the people as freely expressed at the poll.
“The 2023 election was expected to usher in a much more improved and digitized electoral process in Nigeria. It is in this regard that INEC received an unprecedented whooping sum of N355 billion to conduct a credible election in 2023.
“Despite this sum, and the incredible support received from the international community and civil society organisations, INEC has failed to deliver on a straightforward mandate of meeting the expectations of Nigerians.” Expressing a similar view, eminent lawyer and Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), Chief Mike Ahamba, described the elections as “substantially peaceful and fraudulent.”
Regarding the transmission of results directly from polling units to the INEC server, Ahamba stated that the electoral management body grossly flouted the Electoral Act.
“That was why I said it was substantially fraudulent, it was a big fraud by INEC to bypass what they advertised would be the modules for the election.
“The announcement on radio, television, newspapers, were results sheet transmitted automatically from the polling units. Was that what happened? No, as far as I’m concerned, that election was not conducted in terms of 2020 Electoral Act,” Ahamba said.
However in his own reaction, the Chairman, Presidential Advisory Committee Against Corruption, Prof. Itse Sagay said the non-transmission of the election results from polling units was not enough to invalidate the elections result.
According to him, “I don’t think that, for the fact that the posting of the result didn’t go immediately to the INEC server will invalid the result because what is it posting? It is the result from the polling units, and those are the results which are gathered together and taken to the collection centres all the way before it gets to Abuja. It is the same result.
The manual one, which is what they did is always there as a standby if the electronic one fails. It is done all over the world. In the United States of America, it is the manual one that they rely upon when there is controversy. He further added: “I don’t know whether the Electoral Act says it is a must to transmit the results from polling units. We must be careful about our language. It must not have said ‘must’ because ‘must’ means compulsory. However, that doesn’t necessary overturn the decision of the INEC’’.
Supporting Sagay’s position, Austin Aigbe of Research Centre for Development in Action (RCDA) said INEC’s failure to transmit result electronically from polling units was not enough to call for cancellation of the result. He said the resolve by the opposition parties to challenge the result in court was the right thing to do.
“In all honesty, a call for cancellation of the result or of the entire process was ill conceived and should not be taken seriously. But again, the same parties have now come out to say they will challenge the process and they’ve got evidence. I think that is the way to go. If you feel cheated in a race and you got your evidence, like I said, Form EC8A from all of the polling unit areas where election took place, then is it enough justifiable reason to then challenge the process. Because if those results are real, it then means that the electoral process went well until such a time when INEC abandoned its own rule to upload the results from the polling unit,”. he declared.”
