By now the news must have filtered out that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has postponed the governorship and state house of assembly elections scheduled for Saturday, March 11.
The polls have now been rescheduled by one week to March 18,
The postponement was due to the inability of the electoral body to commence the re-configuration of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) machines used for the February 25 presidential and National Assembly elections, to enable their use for the state elections.
The commission had to postpone the governorship polls because the BVAS re-configuration would take three or four days and since the machines would all be moved to the headquarters in Abuja to be re-configured and again deployed to the various states and finally to the polling units on time for the exercise.
Reports say that the commission decided the election could no longer proceed as scheduled after it realized that the reconfiguration of the BVAS machines cannot be actualized before the March 11 state elections.
The decision was taken at a meeting of INEC commissioners on Wednesday evening.
Earlier on Wednesday INEC had convinced the Abuja Division of the Court of Appeal to vary its order granting Peter Obi of the Labour Party and PDP’s Atiku Abubakar permission to inspect the presidential election materials on the premise that it had to reconfigure the BVAS for the conduction of the governorship polls this Saturday.
The commission was earlier restrained from tampering with the information embedded in the BVAS machines until due inspection was conducted and Certified True Copies (CTC) issued to candidates who are challenging the outcome of the presidential election.
It, however, got the nod of the court to undertake the reconfiguration of the BVAS for the governorship and state assembly elections.
INEC spokesman, Festus Okoye said the BVAS data will be backed up and secured in the cloud for litigants inspection, assuring that the commission will continue to grant all litigants access to the materials they require to pursue their cases in court.
“We wish to reassure all political parties and candidates that the data from the Presidential and National Assembly elections will be backed up and available in INEC cloud facilities, including the INEC Results Viewing Portal (IReV). Political parties can apply for Certified True Copies of the backend data of the BVAS. Also, the results on the BVAS will continue to be available on the IReV for interested parties to access.
“This decision has not been taken lightly but it is necessary to ensure that there is adequate time to back up the data stored on the over 176,000 BVAS machines from the Presidential and National Assembly elections held on 25th February 2023 and then to reconfigure them for the Governorship and State Assembly elections,” he said.
Prior to this development, the political atmosphere has been overtly tense with insinuations, allegations, counter-allegations and suits flying all over the place since the electoral body declared the candidate of the ruling party Bola Ahmed Tinubu as the winner of the February 25 presidential election penultimate Wednesday.
On Monday, members of the opposition led by PDP presidential candidate Atiku Abubakar staged a street protest in Abuja to ventilate their position and pressurize INEC to cancel the disputed presidential polls.
Besides the chorus of claims, debates and diatribes, I am obliged to say that Nigeria has had a presidential contest that was unprecedented and multidimensional four-horse race.
The All Progressive Congress (APC) flagbearer had garnered more than 25% of the vote in 30 of Nigeria’s 36 states, which was enough for victory.
Tinubu’s victory did not come as a surprise as he was the most likely candidate to achieve the electoral requirement of national spread and acceptability.
Tinubu who surprisingly lost Lagos, his home state, to Labour Party’s Peter Obi, received over 8.7 million votes – the lowest winning tally in the history of Nigeria’s presidential elections.
Atiku Abubakar, the main opposition candidate, received over 6.9 million votes, while Obi polled third with more than 6.1 million votes.
The general polls figures showed that Tinubu, who defeated Atiku with over 1.8m votes, won majority of the votes cast in 12 states, namely, Zamfara, Jigawa, Niger, Kwara, Oyo, Ekiti, Kogi, Benue, Ogun, Borno, Ondo, and Rivers states.
On his part, Atiku, who came second, also won in 12 states even as LP’s Peter Obi led in 11 states and the FCT.
The states where Atiku won are Osun,
Kebbi, Sokoto, Katsina, Kaduna, Bayelsa,
Akwa Ibom, Bauchi, Yobe, Gombe,
Adamawa and Taraba; while Obi won in
Abia, Lagos, Edo, Enugu, Anambra, Imo,
Ebonyi, Cross River, Delta, Nasarawa,
Plateau and FCT. Kwankwaso, meanwhile, won only in Kano.
However, it is instructive to note that the voter turnout was abysmally low this term. About 24 million Nigerians participated in the exercise which was less than 29 million who voted in the 2019 presidential elections. Sadly enough, there were considerable efforts by some divisive, undesirable elements to divide Nigerians along the usual faultllnes with marginal success, however.
The opposition parties, mainly Atiku’s PDP, together with the Labour Party and the African Democratic Congress, claimed that the February 25th election was “irretrievably compromised” and demanded that the results be nullified.
Obviously, some candidates are hard put accepting the election results. And, it is within their rights to seek legal redress. But they should do so without recourse to drama and overheating the polity.
Any challenge to the electoral outcome should (as it is now) be made in a court of law, and not in the streets. As already stated in several quarters, what is neither right nor defensible is for anybody to resort to violence.
So, was the February 25 elections flawed? I doubt as much. Tell me, how could elections in which President Muhammadu Buhari failed to deliver his party’s candidate in his home state be flawed? Or even in the polls where Tinubu was unable to capture Lagos? How could the elections be flawed when powerful governors like Nasir El-Rufai, Abdullahi Ganduje, Simon Lalong and Atiku Bagudu all failed to deliver victory for APC in their respective states? In addition, not fewer than seven serving state governors lost the race to represent their senatorial districts in the parliamentary elections. Has any Senator or Representative elect of PDP or LP rejected their certificate of return in the same “flawed elections”?
Thus, all these emotional outbursts and uproar about BVAS and INEC Results Viewing Portal (iRev) are mischievous and the courts will finally decide on this matter. The complaints about IRev or whatever it was that people were saying the INEC did not use to upload the results in real time is like an open portal for all accredited players in each polling unit, after the hardcopies are signed by all agents and officials, a digital camera, a handset camera or any picture taking device can be used to snap the picture of the hardcopy and sent to the portal. The deployment of iRev is not sancrosanct as it is not a provision in the Electoral Act 2022. Its stipulated only in the electoral guidelines as procedural measure to assist INEC conduct credible polls. On election day, INEC deliberately delayed that simply because they noticed that some people were attempting to hack their systems, obviously for nefarious activities. Now, since all agents have been given the leeway to snap these copies, what stopped the political parties from setting up their own Situation Rooms so that their agents could readily send these results to them instantaneously? Hence, they could monitor and calculate votes promptly from the polling units. Why are some people making so much noise about the IRev issue? Thankfully, the courts can only deal with what is factual not emotional outbursts.
