2023 Election: Yakubu, Not Buhari, Responsible If Crisis Breaks Out — CNPP

Conference of Nigeria Political Par­ties (CNPP) has asked Nigerians to hold the chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, not President Muhammadu Buhari, responsible if anything goes wrong in the country following INEC’s alleged inability to follow its own guidelines for the 2023 general elections.

The CNPP, in a statement signed by its Secretary-General, Chief Willy Ezugwu, noted that President Buhari has done everything humanly possible to ensure free, fair, and credible gener­al elections but the failure of INEC to follow its electoral guidelines is the problem.

The CNPP spoke while reacting to the verdict of the Court of Appeal, Abuja, granting approval to INEC to reconfigure the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) for the Governorship and State Houses of Assembly elections and the eventual postponement of the state elections earlier scheduled for March 11, 2023.

The CNPP noted that “if INEC ends up tampering with the information in the BVAS machines or erases evidence of what actually transpired during the now contentious presidential election, it may lead to a disaster the country should not be allowed to happen to Nigeria and Nigerians.”

According to the CNPP, “INEC should have foreseen the fact that since it introduced technology in the conduct of the 2023 general elections, liti­gants would always apply for the inspection of materials used in the conduct of elections.

“For INEC to seek an order of the court to reconfigure the BVAS machines without due inspection of their raw data and certified true copies (CTC) of them issued to parties wish­ing to obtain the information is a recipe for avoidable crisis.

“President Muhammadu Buhari has no blame if any­thing goes wrong as a result of the move by INEC. The chair­man of the commission, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, should be solely held responsible.

“It is strange that INEC, which failed to upload election results from the polling units to the INEC Result Viewing (IReV) portal would seek to reconfig­ure the BVAS while litigations are being initiated by disputing political parties that felt cheated by virtue of the failure of the commission to upload results of the elections in real-time from the polling units”.

On the postponed governor­ship and state legislative elec­tions, the CNPP wondered why INEC rushed to conduct the Presidential and National As­sembly elections “knowing that it will be unable to upload the results from the polling units.

“We call on Nigerians and the international community to hold INEC to account for whatever crisis that may em­anate from its actions and/or inactions as President Buhari did his part by signing the amended Electoral Act 2022 and deploying all the security agencies to ensure that we held the elections in peaceful envi­ronment.

“INEC chairman’s Cha­tham House lecture expressly assured Nigerians and the international community of the commission’s readiness to ensure a free, fair and credible elections but the same INEC has continued to create doubts about its lack of adequate preparations for the 2023 gen­eral elections.

“Unfortunately, INEC failed to halt the collation of results of the 2023 Presidential and Na­tional Assembly elections even when Nigerians complained that the result were not being uploaded to the INEC IREV portal in real-time. The com­mission went ahead to manu­ally collate and announce the results and took a whole week to slowly upload many mu­tilated results, creating wide suspension that the outcomes were doctored. And to make matters worse, INEC sought to reconfigure the BVAS amid al­legations of rigging”, the CNPP stated.