Postponement of polls: INEC has eroded our confidence – Labour Party

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Postponement of polls: INEC has eroded our confidence – Labour Party

The Labour Party has said the recent conduct of the Independent National Electoral Commission has done incalculable damage to the trust Nigerians once had in the commission’s promise to let the people’s vote count.

National Chairman of the party, Comrade Julious Abure, said this in an interview in Abuja, on Thursday.

He explained that he was one of those who at various forums expressed implicit confidence in the ability of the Prof. Mahmood Yakubu-led INEC to deliver based on his repeated assurances that the commission would adhere strictly to its rules and the tamper proof BVAS technology.

According to Abure, INEC not only failed to deliver but had through its subsequent actions shown that it cannot be trusted.

The LP Chairman expressed misgivings over INEC’s various applications to court, reliefs sort and the postponement of the Governorship and State Assembly elections earlier scheduled for Saturday, March 11, 2023.

Abure said, “…Our major concern is that aspect (of the Appeal Court ruling) which granted INEC the opportunity not to allow us to inspect the BVAS. Our concern really stems from the fact that INEC these days is it to be trusted.

“INEC will make a promise from one side of the mouth and then swallow their vomit from the other.

“Recall that in 2019, INEC promised that it had a server only for those servers not to be available when litigants wanted to inspect the server that they claimed they had.

“INEC had gone out of their way to assure and reassure Nigerians again and again that election results will be uploaded from polling units to their server and that people are going to view these results from their server but you could see that when it was time for people to start uploading the results, INEC said it had a technical glitch even when they had explained to Nigerians that they had backup that will roll off into work immediately when the main server had a technical issue.

“All of these brings us to the point that even though INEC had assured us and the courts they in their counter affidavits to say that the records in the BVAS will be saved in their backend server we have our doubts because this is not the first time INEC will be telling us that they have a server, they will upload to their server and so on and so forth.

“But the Court in their wisdom has given them privilege and you can see, immediately they got that judgement yesterday, they shifted the elections.

“If they knew they were going to postpone the governorship election for a week why did they go to court to go and vary the order given to us to inspect materials?

“There was absolutely no need for it because one of the reasons they gave to the court was that if they allowed us to inspect the BVAS it would affect the timeline for the election but surprisingly, after getting the court to grant them the request to reconfigure the BVAS they immediately shifted the election.

“One had a lot of doubts about the patriotism, commitment, truthfulness and integrity of this INEC to do what it right.

“The way and manner they conducted the last election has completely destroyed the confidence which I had in INEC. Let’s see what stories they will come up with tomorrow.

“Tomorrow is here it’s not far. Since the court gave the order for INEC to allow

is inspect materials, INEC has not allowed us.

“We’ve not be able to inspect, our lawyers have been going there everyday, our technical experts have been going there on daily basis and we have not been allowed access.

“At times you begin to wonder whether this INEC is working for Nigerians or some persons somewhere.

“I’ll be sincere with you, if INEC says they are going to Lagos, I will go and look for them in Sokoto. We are ready for the elections it it INEC is a law unto itself.”