The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has just raised the alarm. It has accused the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) of obliterating facts and destroying evidence over the 2019 presidential election. The party said the commission has embarked on a desperate mission: that of replacing all the servers in its headquarters and offices in all states of the federation and Abuja in a bid to bury the real results of the presidential election as transmitted from the polling centres across the country.
This outcry from the PDP is the culmination of muted and veiled exchanges that assumed the centre stage shortly after INEC announced the results of the election. After weeks of dumb discourses, the PDP has finally blurted out. It has an axe to grind with the commission.
The PDP has, all along, been accusing INEC of duplicity and complicity. It had declared pointedly, while the commission was dilly-dallying over the results of the presidential election, that it won convincingly and that it had evidence from INEC’s central server to prove its point. The commission had then tried to treat the matter as a passing fancy of the PDP. But the issue is beginning to grow wings. In fact, it has become a thorn in the flesh of the commission. If the allegation from PDP is anything to go by, then it should be taken that the commission hardly knows how to extricate itself from the server mess.
The chairman of the commission, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, had, prior to the election, told the world that results of the presidential election and other elections for that matter would be transmitted electronically to the commission’s server. This, he said, would be done to complement the manual collation and transmission of results. Even though President Muhammadu Buhari declined assent to the electoral amendment bill, which sought to make electronic transmission of votes part of our electoral laws, Yakubu’s INEC promised that there was nothing to worry about. He told Nigerians and the international community that the servers had been configured to receive results electronically, assuring that Nigerians should expect a seamless, technology-driven electoral process.
Yakubu’s assurances did not stop there. He also said that the commission was fully ready with the card reader machines, which had been configured in such a way that accreditation of voters would be smooth and without the kind of hitches we experienced in 2015. Having said all this, Yakubu dropped the ultimate clincher, to wit: that only voters with permanent voter cards whose fingerprints were read and authenticated by the smart card reader machine would be allowed to vote. In saying all this, Yakubu looked serious. His visage spelt commitment. It was thought and taken almost for granted that the man meant business. Nigerians gave him the benefit of the doubt. They believed him and went about their normal businesses, waiting for the elections to come. Then the elections came and the people filed out to exercise their franchise. But they got a rude shock. The smart card readers did not work in a number of places. Strangely, however, people were allowed to cast their votes without having their cards verified and thumbprints read by the card readers. With that, INEC was caught in a lurch. How could it make good its promise to Nigerians? The development, naturally, threw INEC into confusion. It could not reconcile itself with the opposing tendencies. In the face of this confusion, many things went wrong. There were cases of over-voting. In a number of cases, the number of accredited voters contradicted what was available in the voters’ register. Even in the process of announcing some of the results, we had cases of figures that did not add up. The poor job that was hurriedly put together for purposes of arriving at a predetermined outcome went burst. The result was that the outcome of the election became hopelessly flawed.
When the results of the presidential elections were announced, the main opposition party, the PDP, which was favoured to win the election, given the mood of the people and the projections from opinion polls, was seen trailing behind the All Progressives Congress (APC). A good many Nigerians cried foul.
In the face of the malfeasance that took place, the PDP is contesting the outcome of the election. It has approached the courts for this purpose. To make its case watertight, the party has to rely on some exhibits. One of them is the server of the commission, where the results of the elections must have been transmitted, in line with Yakubu’s assurances. From PDP’s findings, the authentic results of the 2019 presidential elections are captured in INEC’s server. And from what the main opposition party has put out, it (the PDP) scored the highest number of votes to beat the APC to second position. The PDP is relying on this as one of the planks of its disputation over the 2019 presidential polls.
But there is a snag here. INEC appears to be engaging in a huge coverup. It is claiming that there are no results in its server. In fact, it is saying that its server is empty. But the PDP is insisting that the server was not empty until its content was wiped out by INEC. It is employing all possible means, including procuring the services of companies that provided INEC with the platform, namely, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle, to prove its case. This development may be unsettling for the electoral commission. Its case is not helped by the fact that one of its national commissioners, Mike Igini, recently affirmed that the commission, indeed, transmitted results to its server.
The fireworks are on and the APC has joined the fray. It is demanding that Atiku Abubakar, the presidential candidate of the PDP in the 2019 election, and his party be sanctioned for hacking into INEC’s server. APC is also faulting PDP’s reliance on results from INEC’s server, arguing that there is no law to rely upon in making the transmission of results to the server mandatory.
These are interesting developments. But the question that must be asked is this: if INEC’s server is truly empty as some elements in INEC and APC would have us believe, why the jitters over the verification of its content? Again, we need to know why INEC is speaking from both sides of the mouth in this matter. In one breath, the commission assures us that results were transmitted electronically to its server. In another breath, it denies all that, insisting that results were only transmitted manually. As we watch the turn of events, it is important to remind APC that its argument about the absence of relevant laws to back electronic transmission of votes does not hold water here. We do not need any law to establish whether INEC has results in its server or not. What makes sense in this matter is for INEC to come clean. The country will be embarrassed to no end if we end up with a situation where the foreign service providers burst the bond of secrecy that is standing in the way of hard facts.