Former Nigerian Vice Presidential candidate and 2023 Labour Party Presidential candidate, Peter Obi, has raised allegations against the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), accusing it of enabling electoral fraud and producing leadership through fraudulent means.
The Labour Party candidate voiced his concerns in a final statement presented to the Presidential Election Petitions Court on July 23. He criticized INEC, stating that the commission’s actions have wasted both time and resources of the nation.
Obi and the Labour Party cautioned that unless the court intervenes to ensure INEC conducts its duties impartially and independently, elections in Nigeria will continue to be tainted by fraud.
They further accused INEC of neglecting its primary role as an electoral referee and instead participating in the elections as a candidate, citing the case of PDP v. Alechenu (2019) as an example of such behavior.
Obi’s allegations didn’t stop there. He also claimed that INEC failed to upload and transmit the election results from the polling units to the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV) on the day of the election in real-time, a commitment they had made prior to the election.
According to Obi, INEC assured the use of Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) for voter accreditation at the polling units and the real-time upload and transmission of the election results. However, he alleges that INEC did not fulfill this promise.
Instead, the Mahmood led organisation was accused of uploading blurred and inaccessible documents/ images onto the IReV, claiming these were the results from various polling units. Obi stated that the authenticity of the election could not be verified due to these blurred images, thereby undermining the credibility and transparency of the election.
SOURCE: Politics Nigeria
IMAGE: DailyPost
