By Harry Awurumibe, Editor, Abuja Bureau
The last may not have been heard about the February 25 Presidential Election as the electoral umpire, Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has said that it will not allow aggrieved political parties and individuals seeking to have access to the Commission’s Backend Server or Cloud for whatsoever reason.
This is even as the Chairman of the Inter Party Advisory Council (IPAC), Engineer Yabagi Sani has accused INEC of complicity in the glitches that hampered the presidential election results from being uploaded in the INEC Viewing Portal (iREV) in realtime on the election day.
Speaking on Channels Television programme Sunday Politics monitored in Abuja on Sunday night, INEC National Commissioner and Chairman of Voter Education, Barrister Festus Okoye, made it categorically clear that the Commission will not allow the public access to its Backend Server or Cloud.
Okoye who was reacting to the question asked him by the television anchor, Seun Okinbaloye, that some political parties that are challenging the Presidential election results at the Presidential Election Petition
Tribunal and Appeal Court are complaining that INEC has not allowed them to have access to the Commission’s Backend Server or Cloud and also want to observe the Backing up of the Presidential election results to ensure that no data is lost in the process, said INEC will not allow such to happen.
Said he: “INEC will not allow the political parties to make the rules of the elections in Nigeria as the Commission is the only body in Nigeria that has the constitutional rights to make the guidelines for our elections. Political parties cannot dictate the rules. That will not happen. We cannot allow them to inspect our Backend Server or INEC Cloud, that will not happen “.
On another complaint of some aggrieved political parties that they are still not able to view all the Presidential election results in (iREV) several days after the election was concluded and winner announced, Okoye said that political parties need not wait for the Commission to provide all the results because there were Polling Units where elections did not hold.
“Political parties need not wait for the Commission before they will get their own results because they are supposed to have received them from the Party Agents they deployed to over 176, 000 Polling Units across Nigeria. Each political party’s agent at the PU level got a copy of the result sheet so they need not come to INEC to inspect our Backend Server or Cloud. We will not allow it”, the INEC top official insists.
Meanwhile, IPAC Chairman who also appeared on the programme on Sunday night likened INEC to the ill-fated RMS Titanic, a British passenger liner which sank in the North Atlantic Ocean on 15 April 1912 after striking an iceberg in the mid ocean on its maiden voyage, saying the way the Commission performed on February 25 Presidential Election has left doubts in the minds of Nigerians.
Sani insists INEC failed woefully on the day it mattered most, lamenting the irregularities that trailed the results of Presidential election just as he accused INEC of insincerity and deliberately hiding the reason the (iREV) failed to work when it was time to upload the results of the Presidential election.
Said he: It is sad that the Commission has refused to tell Nigerians what happened to its Server and why the glitches only occurred during the upload of Polling Units Results of Presidential Election.
“How can the Commission explain to Nigerians that polling units results of the Senatorial and Federal House of Representatives elections which were held together had no problems being uploaded into the (iREV) but the Presidential election results failed to be uploaded into the (iREV). It showed that the Presidential election results were tampered with and till today INEC has not been able to tell Nigerians what happened on the Election Day “, the IPAC Chairman said.
Sani accused INEC of not been truthful with Nigerians, saying that the Commission owe the citizens deserve to know why their expectations were dashed because of the sloppy way the February 25 Presidential Election was handled.
He however said the Governorship and State Houses of Assembly elections of March 18 should go on and at the end of all the elections, the searchlight will be beamed into the catastrophic Presidential Election of February 25 conducted by INEC.
Also speaking on the programme,
Hussain Abdu, Chairman, Board of Yiaga Africa, said it took 24hrs for INEC to tell the public what happened to iREV portal and the election day glitches, adding that even when INEC said something, it did not explain anything to Nigerians till date.
