By Udume Chibueze
It has been claimed that the Independent National election Commission (INEC) has created leaders out of election fraudsters.
Peter Obi, the Labour Party’s (LP) nominee for president in 2023, made the accusation.
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According to him, the electoral umpire is wasting the nation’s time and resources as a result.
In their final address submitted on July 23 to the Presidential Election Petitions Court, Obi made this statement.
As a result, Obi and LP issued a warning that if the court does not force INEC to carry out its electoral responsibilities in a reasonable, impartial, and independent manner, elections in Nigeria will continue to be a fraud.
In addition, he charged that INEC proudly donned the toga of a candidate in the election it oversaw, neglecting its fundamental legal obligation to serve as an electoral arbiter.
In PDP v. Alechenu (2019) LPELR-49199 (CA), the court reprimanded the first respondent (INEC), who appeared to have misunderstood its public duty, saying that: “Often one finds cases where INEC plays games with election materials and would not grant the petitioner(s) access to documents used in the conduct of the election, even with court order(s) to produce same, as in this case, thus playing the cards of the declared winner, Both Obi and LP said.
Obi went on to accuse INEC of failing to upload or transfer the election results from the polling place to the IReV in real-time on election day.
He said,
“By doing so, INEC represented and guaranteed that it would use the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) to accredit voters in polling places and upload/transmit election results in real time on election day to the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV).
“However, in defiance of the law and with blatant disrespect for its own assertions, the first respondent (INEC) abandoned and discarded the much-anticipated upload/transmission of the election result in real-time on the day of the election from the polling unit to the IReV.
The first respondent uploaded papers and photographs to the IReV that were quite curiously blurry, illegible, and inaccessible and claimed to be the results of the elections at various polling places.
These hazy photos and inaccessible documents supposedly came from the voting booths.
The election lacked credibility and transparency as a result of the fuzzy photos being uploaded to the IReV, which made it impossible to authenticate or verify.
