As Nigerians head to polls tomorrow, ActionAid Nigeria has urged the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, to ensure that the many challenges that marred the credibility of the Presidential election are handled ahead of Saturday’s Governorship election in parts of the country.
The country representative of the agency, Mrs. Ene Obi, made the call yesterday in Abuja while addressing journalists, and said Independent National Electoral Commission INEC should focus on tomorrow’s election.
She said women should not give up because we are fighting for our children, we are fighting for humanity. Women we do not have a tribe we don’t have parties our party is humanity our tribe is also humanity.
“Let’s focus on the governorship election. Let’s see what will happen here because deployment is going to the States already earlier than normal time so let’s hope that this is going to work.
According to her, When we noted that they were talking about the presidential result were not going to be uploaded on the IREV portal, we reported to INEC and he granted a press conference.
“I don’t want us to go out of here expecting that INEC did not envisage anything that happened during the presidential election. How did INEC get National Assembly results uploaded without a problem and what happened to presidential results?
ActionAid Nigeria Digital technology manager, Charles Petu said INEC explained to us what BVAS is expected to do and they want the result to be transmitted but what they did not envisage is there might be network failure and most of the polling unit our observer reported that they experienced network failure.
“We look at a situation where INEC would have envisaged that and make alternative arrangements because in technology we deploy what we call diversity. Diversity in communication means if one device fails, there should be a backup So INEC should have anticipated a backup mechanism to upload results, if there was a failure of one there should be an alternative,” he said
On her part, ActionAid Nigeria, Director of the program, Hajia Suwaiba Dankabo ,said”The integrity of election should not be rest on the technology alone. The integrity of the election was far beyond the technology which can experience failure at any time, the human being operate the technology and if you want to operate the technology, let’s put our eyes on how the technology is supported, to give us what we want.”
