2023: Political parties accuse INEC of mishandling elections, exonerate Buhari

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) Chairman, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, rather than President Muhammadu Buhari, should be held accountable, according to the Conference of Nigerian Political Parties (CNPP) if there is a political impasse in the nation as a result of the controversy surrounding its failure to adhere to its own rules for the general elections in 2023.

In a statement released on Friday and signed by Chief Willy Ezugwu, the CNPP stated that President Buhari had done everything within his power to ensure free, fair, and credible general elections and that INEC’s failure to follow its electoral standards was a prescription for disaster.

Ezugwu spoke while reacting to the verdict of the Court of Appeal, granting approval to INEC to reconfigure the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) for the governorship and state house of assembly elections and the eventual postponement of the state elections earlier scheduled for March 11, 2023.

The CNPP said, “If INEC ends up tampering with the information in the BVAS machines or erases evidence of what actually transpired during the now contentious presidential election, it may lead to a disaster; the country should not allow that to happen to Nigeria and Nigerians.

“INEC should have foreseen the fact that since it introduced technology in the conduct election, litigants would always apply for the inspection of materials used in the conduct of elections.

“For INEC to seek an order of the Court to reconfigure the BVAS machines without due inspection of their raw data and certified true copies (CTC) of them issued to parties wishing to obtain the information is a recipe for avoidable crisis.

READ ALSO:INEC boss, Yakubu meets with RECs ahead of guber polls, assures improved BVAS

“Buhari should be blamed if anything goes wrong as a result of the move by INEC, Yakubu should be solely held responsible.

“It is strange that INEC, which failed to upload election results from the polling units to the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV) would seek to reconfigure the BVAS while litigations are being initiated by disputing political parties that felt cheated by virtue of the failure of the Commission to upload results of the elections in real-time from the polling units.”

The CNPP also questioned why INEC rushed to hold the presidential and national assembly elections while knowing that it wouldn’t be able to upload the results from the voting booths, leading to the postponement of the elections.

“Unfortunately, INEC failed to halt the collation of results of the 2023 presidential and National Assembly elections even when Nigerians complained that the result were not being uploaded to the INEC IREV portal in real-time. The commission went ahead to manually collate and announce the results and took a whole week to slowly upload many mutilated results, creating wide suspicion that the outcomes were doctored. And to make matters worse, INEC sought to reconfigure the BVAS amid allegations of rigging,” the CNPP stated.

The INEC, during the week, postponed the governorship and states’ assembly elections till March 18.

The exercise was previously scheduled to hold on March 11, but INEC, citing a logistics crisis stemming from BVAS configuration and transportation, said the election could no longer proceed as scheduled following a meeting of its executives on Wednesday evening.

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