LP says INEC has failed to obey court order on inspection of election materials
By Jeph Ajobaju, Chief Copy Editor
Failure by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to conduct the federal elections transparently has completely destroyed to the trust Nigerians once had in its promise to let votes count, laments the Labour Party (LP).
LP National Chairman Julious Abure recounted in Abuja he was among those who at various forums expressed confidence in the ability of the INEC to deliver, based on repeated assurances by its Chairman, Mahmood Yakubu, that the Commission would abide by its rules backed by a tamper proof BVAS technology.
He said but the INEC failed to deliver on its promise and has shown through subsequent actions that it cannot be trusted.
Abure expressed misgivings about applications INEC makes to court, reliefs sought, and the postponement of the governorship and state Assembly elections from March 11 to March 18.
“Our major concern is that aspect (of the Appeal Court ruling) which granted INEC the opportunity not to allow us to inspect the BVAS. Our concern really stems from the fact that INEC these days cannot be trusted,” he said.
“INEC will make a promise from one side of the mouth and then swallow their vomit from the other.
“Recall that in 2019, INEC promised that it had servers, only for those servers not to be available when litigants wanted to inspect the servers that they claimed they had.
“INEC had gone out of their way to assure and reassure Nigerians again and again that election results will be uploaded from polling units to their server and that people are going to view these results from their server.
“But you could see that when it was time for people to start uploading the results, INEC said it had a technical glitch even when they had explained to Nigerians that they had backup that will roll off into work immediately when the main server had a technical issue.
“All of these bring us to the point that even though INEC had assured us and the courts they in their counter affidavits to say that the records in the BVAS will be saved in their backend server we have our doubts because this is not the first time INEC will be telling us that they have a server, they will upload to their server and so on and so forth.
“But the court in its wisdom has given them privilege and you can see, immediately they got that judgement yesterday, they shifted the elections.”
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INEC fails to obey court order
“If they knew they were going to postpone the governorship election for a week why did they go to court and vary the order given to us to inspect materials?” Abure wondered, per reporting by Vanguard.
“There was absolutely no need for it because one of the reasons they gave to the court was that if they allowed us to inspect the BVAS it would affect the timeline for the election but, surprisingly, after getting the court to grant them the request to reconfigure the BVAS they immediately shifted the elections.
“One had a lot of doubts about the patriotism, commitment, truthfulness and integrity of this INEC to do what it right.
“The way and manner they conducted the last election has completely destroyed the confidence which I had in INEC. Let’s see what stories they will come up with tomorrow.
“Tomorrow is here, it’s not far. Since the court gave the order for INEC to allow
us inspect materials, INEC has not allowed us.
“We’ve not been able to inspect [the materials], our lawyers have been going there everyday, our technical experts have been going there on daily basis, and we have not been allowed access.
“At times you begin to wonder whether this INEC is working for Nigerians or some persons somewhere.
“I’ll be sincere with you, if INEC says they are going to Lagos, I will go and look for them in Sokoto. We are ready for the elections it is INEC [that] is a law unto itself.”