Akande said that while INEC has not broken the law in accordance with the judgment delivered by the PEPC Nigerians now distrust the body.
By Jeffrey Agbo
Former Vice President Yemi Osinbajo’s spokesman, Laolu Akande, has criticised the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) for failing to do what it promised Nigerians at the 2023 general polls.
Mr Akande said INEC broke the trust of Nigerians by failing to transmit election results in real-time to its servers just as it promised locally and abroad.
“It is important to establish something we cannot basically run away from. INEC came out of this election as a damaged good. There is no doubt about that,” he said on Channels TV’s Politics Today on Friday.
“INEC itself set up a standard, determined the guidelines. INEC committed to the people of Nigeria that this is how we are going to declare the result of the election.
“In fact, the Chairman of INEC went abroad and said, ‘What we are going to do is that this results, when we get it, we would put it on our IReV in real-time.’”
Akande further stated that while INEC has not broken the law in accordance with the judgment delivered by the Presidential Election Petition Court, Nigerians now distrust the body.
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He said, “Now guess what? When it was time for INEC to fulfill its own guidelines—for certain reasons, we could talk about that—INEC failed to do what it said it would do. Now it is right if you look at the law, and I think the judges have also affirmed that INEC has not really broken the law. But INEC has broken the trust of the Nigerian people.
“It’s a problem for political legitimacy for people that came out of that system.”
The five-member panel of the PEPC, headed by Justice Haruna Tsammani, on Wednesday ruled that the Electoral Act 2022 does not contain a mandatory provision for the electronic transmission of election results.
Akande’s former principal, Osinbajo, sought the presidential ticket of the All Progressives Congress last year but now-President Bola Tinubu won the primary.
