INEC yet to tell Nigerians what went wrong with IReV portal, says IPAC

Yabagi Sani, chairman of the Inter-Party Advisory Council (IPAC), says the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) is yet to tell Nigerians what went wrong with the result viewing portal (IReV) during the presidential and national assembly polls.

The commission had assured Nigerians that polling unit results would be uploaded to the portal in real-time during the general election to improve the transparency of the electoral process.

But the portal was inactive for a long time, even after voting had ended in some polling units.

Subsequently, there were speculations that the IReV was hacked but INEC said the portal only had technical hitches.

Speaking on Sunday when he was featured on Channels Television’s ‘Sunday Politics’, Sani the situation is “fishy” and must be looked into.

“INEC is yet to come out to tell Nigerians what happened so that the trust Nigerians had for them will come back. If INEC had come back to say the system was hacked, this is not the first system that will be hacked, the most sophisticated systems in the world have been hacked, that’s not something that people will say cannot happen,” he said.

“Some people may ask why they didn’t make redundancy factors into their servers so that when this one fails, another will seamlessly take over and we will not suffer this kind of unnecessary disaster that we are in today.

“It beats my imagination that they said they were just relying on one system with no backup in such a very high stake environment.

“My grouse with INEC is not coming out to tell us the truth, that this is what happened. But Festus Okoye only said they know what happened and have rectified it but what happened?

“It was a selective failure in the elections, the transmission as far as senate and house of representatives was going on smoothly. Why was it presidential that wasn’t going on smoothly? Something wrong and fishy is there. We must get to the root of what happened.”

The IPAC chairman said INEC should take advantage of the forthcoming governorship and state assembly polls to redeem its image.

“INEC should take advantage of this second chance they have to redeem their image because they have an image that is not too good as it is today. And I think if it’s about the technical aspect of the exercise, what INEC needs to do is to address the redundancy in the link,” he said.