Nigeria’s electoral umpire, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), have debunked the insinuations that wasting taxpayers’ money following its inability to upload all the 25th of February presidential election results on its Result Viewing Portal (IReV).
Speaking during an interview on Channels Television’s Politics Today,which was monitored by Africa Today News, new York on Thursday, INEC spokesman, Festus Okoye pointed out that it is wrong to insinuate that the electoral body wasted taxpayers’ money.
He clarified that the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) was successfully used for voter accreditation, and result upload for the polls.
‘We are only talking about result upload for the presidential election only. It is not true or correct to insinuate even remotely that taxpayers’ money was wasted, and the machine did not work,’ Okoye said.
Earlier, Okoye said the glitch experienced in the upload of the February 25 presidential election in the country should not write off the entire polls held nationwide.
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He called on Nigerians not to judge the electoral empire as a result of the challenge the commission experienced in the upload of the presidential election.
‘It is not fair to judge the entire performance of the commission on the basis of a glitch in the result upload for the presidential election,’ he said.
According to Okoye, the law has empowered political parties to know what goes on at the polling units.
‘Almost all the political parties nominated and got accredited at least over 170,000 polling agents. What that means is that they had primary evidence of the results from the polling units.
‘It is those results from the polling units, together with the BVAS as a machine itself that goes to the collation centre. So, it is not true for a political party to rely only on result upload in order to get the evidence with which it wants to prosecute its case in court,’ he added.
Africa Today News, New York recalls that sometime in early March, INEC Chairman, Mahmood Yakubu, admitted some glitches experienced during the conduct of presidential and National Assembly polls.