Logistic materials destroyed as fire guts INEC office ahead of February election in Ibadan

Logistic materials have been destroyed as fire gutted the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) office Ibadan South East Local Government, Oyo State.

The incident occurred around 10.30 am on Friday, January 26, 2024.

This was confirmed in a statement issued in Ibadan by the state Resident Electoral Commissioner (REC), Dr Adeniran Tella.

The REC stated that the cause of the fire was yet to be ascertained but was assumed to have been triggered off by power surge.

He also stated that no life was lost, adding that only logistic materials got burnt.

Tella added that the incident had no effect on the Saki West State Constituency re-run election coming up on February 3.

Meanwhile, a former Chairman of the INEC, Prof Attahiru Jega, says the electoral umpire owes Nigerians an explanation regarding the failure of the commission’s Result Viewing Portal (IReV) and the Bimodal Voter Registration Systems (BVAS) during the 2023 general elections.

The political scientist spoke on Inside Sources with Laolu Akande aired on Channels Television on Friday. The former Vice-Chancellor of Bayero University, Kano, blamed desperate politicians for allegedly infiltrating the two technological systems introduced by INEC for the accreditation and electronic transmission of votes in the last elections.

At the February 2023 presidential and National Assembly polls, opposition parties complained bitterly that INEC officials at the polling units were unable to upload election results electronically to the IReV, as stipulated by Section 60 of the Electoral Act 2022. The parties kicked against the manual collation of results and the announcement of winners in the polls.

The electoral body acknowledged that certain glitches made real-time transmission of results impossible and promised to fix the situation but opposition parties approached the courts and challenged the victory of Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) who was declared winner of the presidential election. Tinubu later won at the tribunal and the Supreme Court. Jega said though INEC meant well, some politicians circumvented the whole IReV and BVAS systems.

He said, “In 2023, INEC did its best under very difficult circumstances and a lot of these difficult circumstances were caused by the mindset of our selfish politicians who wanted to win by hook or by crook.

“INEC has overtime introduced technology to make the process of election results very transparent with integrity but from my own experience when I was in INEC from 2011 to 2015, and I suspect that a lot of that has continued to be so up to 2023, our reckless politicians try to be a step ahead of INEC; if you introduce something today and you try it, they try to be a step ahead of you and beat it by the next election. And of course, they can also use ways and means to not only truncate but also bypass something that has actually been put legitimately in order to add to the integrity of the process.

“If you ask my opinion, I feel very strongly that INEC needs to tell us more about what happened with the IReV. In fact, at one point, I was even calling for a thorough public inquiry about what happened with regards to IReV. I feel that something has happened, that in spite of the confidence and the very articulate manner the INEC chairman (Mahmood Yakubu) had spoken about the IReV and it then failed.

“I believe that some of our reckless politicians may have infiltrated it and truncated it but INEC will take the blame for that.”

According to him, once the court cases are resolved, “we need to go back to the bottom of what happened with the IReV”.

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