In direct contrast to the excuse given by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Information Minister, Lai Mohammed, has revealed that
In direct contrast to the excuse given by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Information Minister, Lai Mohammed, has revealed that the February 25 presidential election results were deliberately not uploaded to the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV).
According to Mohammed, INEC intentionally withheld the results of the presidential election from the portal on suspicion of cyberattack.
“Under our laws today, management of election results is manual and the court has ruled that INEC has the exclusive right to determine the mode of election, its collation, and transmission.
“What happened on the 25th of February was that INEC observed that the results of the Presidential elections were not being viewed.
“INEC, suspecting cyber-attack, withheld the uploading of the results in order to preserve the integrity of the data,” Mohammed told journalists on Tuesday in Washington DC.
“It immediately proceeded to float an alternative platform while asking its technicians to investigate what happened to its original portal.”
But the minister’s submission contradicts the explanation earlier offered by INEC’s spokesperson, Festus Okoye, as to why the electoral umpire failed to upload the results to the IReV portal.
Following the criticisms that trailed INEC’s failure to upload results of the election to the portal, Okoye had explained a day after the election: “The Commission regrets this setback, especially because of the importance of IReV in our results management process.
“The problem is totally due to technical hitches related to scaling up the IReV from a platform for managing off-season, State elections, to one for managing nationwide general elections. It is indeed not unusual for glitches to occur and be corrected in such situations.”
Meanwhile, Mohammed told the foreign press that proof of the credibility of the presidential election was the defeat of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) in the strongholds of President Muhammadu Buhari and Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the president-elect.
“Nothing gives this election more credence than those facts because there was no rigging in states where our bigwigs come from,” he said.
