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Political Parties Stage Walkout at INEC Collation Results as Doubts Trail Presidential Elections Outcome

Politics

By Missionary Nweke

Feb 27, 2023

As anger and skepticism grows over the authenticity of the results being announced by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), some political parties have staged a walkout at the National Collation Centre, Abuja.

Collation agents of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Labour Party led their counterparts in other parties to walk out on the collation process, accusing INEC Chairman, Mahmood Yakubu of announcing doctored results.

PDP agent, Dino Melaye protesting the discrepancies before the walkout.

They predicated their decision on the refusal of INEC Chairman to grant their request to halt the collation process until the results are uploaded on the commission’s servers, insisting that the method of collation and result announcement was suspect unless the upload was done.  

The party agents, therefore, demanded evidence of upload of the results from the polling units to the commission’s servers, stressing that without that the integrity of the results being announced was suspect.

Though, Yakubu replied that the national collation was exclusive to only concluding of the collation process and that the issues related to upload of results and other issues were supposed to be resolved at the polling unit and ward levels, the political parties asserted that the provisions of the law were clear on the situation.  

FAILED UMPIRE OR COMPROMISED COLLABORATOR? Chairman, INEC, Mahmoud Yakubu

Doubts over the authenticity and integrity of the electoral process arose on the evening of Saturday, February 25, 2023 when reports started emanating from polling units across the country that the bi-modal voter accreditation system (BVAS) were not uploading results of the presidential election.

The complaints ranged from power down of the BVAS due to low battery to shut down of the network to failure of log in data, among others. This created a frenzy as suspicions grew that the election was being set up to be rigged.

This perception was amplified by incidences of voter intimidation, disenfranchisement and vote buying across the country, in some cases involving state governors and thugs loyal to them.

The party agents at the National Collation Centre holding at the International Conference Centre (ICC) were unanimous in demanding that INEC to avoid progressing in error by bypassing unit upload of results to the national level.

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