Former Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Prof Attahiru Jega, has said that the electoral commission owes Nigerians an explanation for the failure of the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV) and the Bimodal Voter Registration Systems (BVAS) during the 2023 general elections.
Appearing on a Channels Television program, Jega claimed that desperate politicians infiltrated the two technological systems introduced by INEC for the accreditation and electronic transmission of votes in the last elections.
He said;
“In 2023, INEC did its best under very difficult circumstances and a lot of these difficult circumstances were caused by the mindset of our selfish politicians who wanted to win by hook or by crook.
INEC has over-introduced technology to make the process of election results very transparent with integrity but from my own experience when I was in INEC from 2011 to 2015, and I suspect that a lot of that has continued to be so up to 2023, our reckless politicians try to be a step ahead of INEC; if you introduce something today and you try it, they try to be a step ahead of you and beat it by the next election.
And of course, they can also use ways and means to not only truncate but also bypass something that has actually been put legitimately to add to the integrity of the process.
If you ask my opinion, I feel very strongly that INEC needs to tell us more about what happened with the IReV. In fact, at one point, I was even calling for a thorough public inquiry about what happened with regards to IReV.
I feel that something has happened, that in spite of the confidence and the very articulate manner the INEC chairman (Mahmood Yakubu) had spoken about the IReV and it then failed.
I believe that some of our reckless politicians may have infiltrated it and truncated it but INEC will take the blame for that. We need to go back to the bottom of what happened with the IReV”.
