By Victor Osula, Abuja

 

 

Millions of Nigerians at home and in the diaspora as well as their global partners waited with bated breath for the February 25, 2023 presidential results that the Independent Electoral Commission, INEC promised would be transmitted live on its INEC Result Viewing Portal, IReV.

As it turned out, the results never came except that of the House of Representatives and Senate, which held on the same day. What happened? INEC was to say at first that it was due to computer glitch, a euphemism for hacking.

Much later after INEC had declared Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress, APC, as winner with 8.3 million votes , followed by Alhaji Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, with 6.5 million votes and Peter Obi of the Labour Party, LP, with 6.2 million votes, former Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed claimed in faraway United States of America during a working visit that the “ INEC suspecting cyber attacked withheld the results to preserve the integrity of the data.”

Who do nit? How did it happen that only results for the National Assembly election held on the same day could be uploaded and not those of the presidential poll, which later formed the basis for the almost seven-months litigation by Atiku and the PDP and Obi and the LP against INEC and Tinubu?

On Friday, February 23, almost a year after that controversial episode that cast a dark spot of Nigeria’s democratization process and INEC’s integrity, the electoral umpires unveiled a 526-page 2023 General Election Report on the poll.

In the report, INEC tried with unbelievable calm to provide a detailed explanation on a very sensitive electoral issue.

It began by admitting that the failure to upload Polling Unit results of the presidential election to IReV in real-time at the close of polls on Saturday 25 February 2023, impacted on the public perception of the election “and elicited widespread commentary.”

The report said, “By and large, the glitch experienced in uploading the scanned images of polling unit presidential election result sheets on 25th February 2023 was due to the inherent complexity within the system, which was difficult to anticipate and mitigate.”

Report Explains Why IReV Failed

Acknowledging the pivotal role of technological advancement, particularly the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, BVAS in boosting electoral integrity and reducing fraud, the Commission said explained that it only started receiving complaints  In the post- election report, INEC explained that when Presiding Officers at polling units at about 4 p.m. when voting ended found they could not upload the result sheets of the presidential elections, it asked field officers for the details of the error in order to trace the origin, source, scale and magnitude.

With this information from the field officers, competent officials immediately engaged in a troubleshooting process, which found out that the errors were caused by an application due to problems “relating to configuration, permissions, or failure to create or access application resources correctly.”

“Further interrogation of the Election Result Modules indicated that the system is encountering an unexpected configuration problem in mapping the presidential election results uploaded into the system to the participating Polling Units,” the report said, adding that, “Each Senatorial District and Federal Constituency election on the database was mapped to their respective States.”

It further stated that, “While the uploads for the National Assembly elections succeeded as the application was able to identify the respective state and build the folder hierarchy for the results organisation process for the election, attempts to upload the presidential election results sheets, which does not belong to or mapped to any state on the database, failed.”

“Instead, it returned a HTTP server error response. This failure is attributable to the inability of the application to create and build a folder structure to organise the uploaded images of the result sheets of the presidential election.”

According to the Commission, it eventually succeeded to make a headway by creating and  using, “Hotfixes” to resolve the HTTP error on the system “and the first presidential election result sheet was successfully uploaded at 8.55pm on the 25th of February 2023.”

By now, many field officers officers who had worked late into the day started leaving their polling units and switched off the election monitoring devices, particularly the BVAS machines having failed to successfully upload results.

Explaining this situation, INEC in the report, said, “The Commission had to reach out to the POs of affected areas to switch on their systems and ensure internet connectivity for the uploads to continue. This accounted for the delay, with some of the results coming in the next day.” 

Lessons

Looking ahead, the Commission reported that it has learnt its lessons and made the necessary corrections on the IReV.

With this knowledge, INEC reported that it has,” taken additional steps to build more resilience and undertaken additional checks to ensure the stability and optimal operation and performance of the IReV portal. Other measures are additional quality assurance checks are now done to complement the end-to-end testing of the entire result upload ecosystem before the conduct of any election.”

After it acknowledged the foregoing shortcomings, the Commission still insisted that the outcome of the 2023 presidential election was credible and there was no cause for alarm. It based this conclusion of the fact the relevant stakeholders such as the political party agents, security personnel and election observers had access to the results from the polling units which significantly corroborated results that were subsequently uploaded on its IReV portal.

APC,  LP and Key Election Observers React

In a swift response to the report, two key participants in the general elections have taken up issues with the Commission.

First is the LP presidential campaign organisation.

Group spokesperson of the body, Tanko Yinusa dismissed the report as “medicine after death.”

According to him, “ Here we are, the report of INEC that the IReV refused to function or results not uploaded is false. Considering the fact that there were three elections that happened on that day, the Federal House of Representatives, the Senate, and the results were uploaded and there was no issue. Why must there be issue as regards the presidential election.? So, totally for us there is disdain for the people and (INEC) is trying to promote indecency.Let me explain better. If INEC says that this is what they are going to do and later on goes to the court to say that they have the right to do manual collation then the court justifies that particular action, it is unacceptable. It is a conspiracy.””

Next is the Chairman of the Nigerian Civil Society Situation Room, a coalition of 70 civil society organisations that monitored the general election, Clement Nwankwo. He noted that the Commission’s report has failed to address the major issues with the 2023 election.

He said the problem with the outcome of the elections, particularly the presidential poll should not be limited to the malfunctioning of the IReV portal but the question of integrity, transparency and due process.

He said, the first problem ha has with the report is timing. “It took INEC an incredibly long time for this explanation to come and it did not match the circumstances of that day when results for same election was uploaded for some and not others. Clearly IReV  was not deployed and the INEC report did not address how the election went.”

“Looking at INEC explanation, we still have a long way to go with conducting our elections. First it took a long time for this explanation to come. How is it possible What the civil society is calling for is an independent audit of what happened in the 2023 elections and unless we do that, the 2027 election will be marred by issues of general accountability that marred the 2023 polls.”

For the the Publicity Director of the All Progressives Congress, Bala Ibrahim, the report is believable.

He said, “Nigerians should salute INEC for being honest and sincere by admitting errors or failures on its side. Whatever we do, we should admit that we are humans and we are not infallible.

“Everything that is technologically based or IT-based is liable to some failures. Even in established democracies where they have perfect infrastructures on IT, they still have glitches here and there.”