Ahead of the governorship and State House of Assembly elections, the Independent National Electoral Commission has been advised to avoid controversies that trailed the presidential and National Assembly elections.
The Chairman, Inter-Party Advisory Council, Yabagi Sani who spoke to our correspondent on Sunday, added that INEC must perform better than Saturday’s elections.
Sani had on 28 February told the INEC Chairman, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, to go ahead with the collation of election results despite the walkout and grievances by political parties in the entire presidential election.
However, speaking with our correspondent, Sani noted that INEC must not violate the law on the transmission of election results on March 11.
He stated “INEC should ensure that there is no repeat of what happened in the presidential and National Assembly elections because the evidence available is that both the guidelines and the law that guides the electoral process especially regarding the transmission of results directly electronically did not happen on February 25.
“Now, it is for the court to now tell us what it means to the election. From the layman’s point of view, the fundamental law has been circumvented but then only the judges can interpret the law. Some of the presidential candidates of different political parties are already heading to court. So because of Nigeria’s cry that greeted that election, our advice to INEC is to ensure that there is no repeat of that kind of violation of the law.”
The Presidential Candidate of the Action Democratic Party added that election officials must live up to expectations as the transmission of results stated by law boosted the confidence of registered voters to come out in mass during Saturday’s elections.
Sani noted “INEC needs to be more vigilant in ensuring that their staff live up to expectations because there were some infractions. The highest point of the Electoral Act is the transmission of results. It gave people a lot of confidence to come out in the manner they did which was however dashed.”
The IPAC Chairman who probably believed that the IReV did not fail noted that only the channel for the presidential election was hacked.
He stated “Although some of us believe that as regards the technological aspect, that is the failure of the BVAS and the transmission of results may not be something that INEC has a hand in.
“Because if one wants to hack into someone’s system, the person will not be told. Perhaps, those that hacked into the system might not be residing in this country. It is open source. For you to know that the system did not fail, the hackers blocked certain channels which are the one for the presidential election.
“They did not block the channel for the National Assembly. That is why I said (though I do not know) but just my own thinking that perhaps this is the work of hackers. No one is sure but I am just trying to gather from the way it happened because what is the difference between the data structure for the president and that of the National Assembly?
“However, what happened generally on Saturday was not a plus for democracy.”
