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“INEC Will Sack Me But Heads Will Roll” — Top Official Reveals How Presidential Election Was Rigged

Published

2 years ago

March 5, 2023

Nigeria’s 2023 presidential election may have come and gone but the controversies trailing its conduct by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) appear to be far from over.

This comes as a senior member of INEC’s staff has told THE WHISTLER that the presidential poll was manipulated in favour of Bola Ahmed Tinubu — the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate.

The official who was deployed to one of the southwestern states during the election, claimed that the electoral process was manipulated and undermined by various forces in connivance with members of INEC.

In the wee hours of March 1, four days after the presidential election, INEC declared that Tinubu of the ruling APC polled 8,794,726 votes to emerge as president-elect ahead of his closest contenders, Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) who got 6,984,520, and Peter Obi of the Labour Party who secured 6,101,533 votes.

INEC declared the winner despite complaints of alleged discrepancies in collated figures and allegations that the electoral umpire failed to abide by its own regulation mandating electronic transmission of the results from polling units using the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) machine.

Known as the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV), the website which was designed to receive photographic images of election result sheets in real-time directly from polling units across the country was reported to have suffered system collapse that prevented the transmission.

But the commission’s senior official who spoke to THE WHISTLER on the condition of anonymity, said the claim that transmission of the results was prevented by server downtime was part of a game plan to manipulate the election.

“It was a very messy election. I am an INEC staff member but no! no!! no!!!

“They (INEC management) made an excuse that our server was hit by hackers 162 times but they are merely deceiving members of the public.

“Why are commercial banks’ servers not being attacked that way? Do banks suffer such attacks to the point that their customers are not able to carry out transactions? It (the election outcome) was scripted and orchestrated to turn out that way,” said the official.

According to him, governors of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) made a special arrangement to take care of INEC staff during the election even though the commission already paid allowances to staff deployed for elections.

“In fact, they (APC governors) were taking care of us and fed us twice daily during our stay for the presidential election.

“I heard they gave money to some INEC officials in some states. And they also gave election observers money, that’s what usually happens. Some APC-controlled states were also allowed to assist the commission with transportation of sensitive election materials on election day.”

The official recalled that, “INEC management had instructed state offices to not deploy election materials and personnel until they’re instructed to do so. That was why they delayed in some states. In strongholds of the APC, they quickly deployed personnel and materials to polling units and in strongholds of opponents, they delayed. In some places, they did not even deploy personnel to the field.

“For instance, in a whole local government where the Labour Party is popular, elections did not start until past 12 PM. Was our chairman not supposed to announce that there won’t be election in that case? In fact, I learnt that voting did not start until about 4:30 PM in some areas.

“All the things people are saying about the election being rigged in favour of the APC is true, there’s no gainsaying it. In fact, worse things that people aren’t aware of happened during the presidential election,” he said.