Leaders in the West African sub-region have called on Nigeria’s electoral umpire, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to comply with the provisions of the Electoral Act 2022 on the collation of results for the presidential and National Assembly elections held on February 25, 2023.
Former Nigerian President, Goodluck Jonathan; ex-Ghanaian President John Mahama and other members of the West African Elders Forum (WAEF) Election Mission to Nigeria made this known in a statement on Tuesday in Abuja.
They appealed for calm in the country while calling on INEC to address the concerns and procedural questions raised so far by different stakeholders.
According to them, INEC’s compliance will retain the confidence of Nigerians in the ongoing collating of Saturday’s election results.
As part of moves to ensure post-election peace, the elders met with presidential candidates including Bola Tinubu of All Progressives Congress (APC), Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP), Rabiu Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP) and Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
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Africa Today News, New York reports that earlier on Tuesday, the LP, PDP and African Democratic Congress (ADC) said the deliberate refusal of the INEC chairman, Mahmood Yakubu to respect the upload of results electronically as stipulated by Section 60 of the Electoral Act 2022 is unacceptable.
The three parties said the result so far by INEC showed “monumental disparities” between what the party agents signed and what INEC officials announced in Abuja.
They said the manual transmission of results compromised the integrity of the election process and demanded a cancellation of the election and asked the electoral chief to step down.
Party agents had staged a walkout from the national collation centre in Abuja on Monday after the INEC chief insisted that the process must continue despite that all results were not electronically transmitted.
Many party leaders have bitterly complained that INEC officials at the polling units were unable to upload election results to the IReV. The IReV and the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) are new technologies introduced by the electoral body for the accreditation and electronic transmission of votes for this year’s polls.
Elections for the office of the President, 360 House of Representatives and 109 Senatorial seats were held in the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory on Saturday and Nigerians expect the declaration of results by the electoral umpire.