Nigeria’s main opposition party, PDP, has threatened to reject the result of the presidential election.
The PDP agent at the national collation centre in Abuja, Dino Melaye, said this Monday while raising concerns about the presidential election result in Kwara.
Mr Melaye argued that the failure of INEC to promptly upload online results from polling units makes the results questionable. He said that the PDP will contest the authenticity of the INEC results.
“As I speak to you, those results were not uploaded for several hours,” Mr Melaye added. “Yesterday I complained to the chairman and two other commissioners and in my presence, they called the REC in Imo, where even the director of ICT was saying they should use offline to upload. So if results were not uploaded, we as parties cannot be challenged that the process is over. The process is not over because it is faulty and results were not uploaded.”
On Sunday, INEC admitted the slow uploading of polling unit results on its result viewing portal (IRev).
The commission said the problem is due to technical hitches.
“It is indeed not unusual for glitches to occur and be corrected in such situations,” INEC said in a statement.
It, however, assures Nigerians that the challenges are not due to any intrusion or sabotage of our systems and that the IReV remains well-secured.
Another agent of the PDP, Emeka Ihedioha, raised the same concerns, saying results presented at the polling unit are contrary to what is being presented at the collation centre in Abuja.
“As we speak, efforts are still ongoing to undermine that process in a number of states,” Mr Ihedioha said. “It is clear that there were problems with uploading the results, which is fundamental to where we are.”
“It is clear to us that in the course of collation, collation officers were forced by people who think they are more powerful to return results,” Mr Ihedioha added.
At the collation centre, the spokesperson of the PDP, Mr Melaye, also raised concerns about the election results in Ekiti State, which was announced at the national collation centre on Sunday.
“I worked on the results as presented yesterday and I discovered that we have 987,647 registered voters in Ekiti and 301, 558 accredited,” he said, alleging there was overvoting. “And since we have 301, 558 accredited, the results as presented yesterday, APC had 201,494. If you subtract that from 301, 558, what you have left is 100, 064.”
“Out of 100,064, PDP scored 89, 554, if you subtract that from 100,064, what is left is 10,510. And now, it was also recorded that Labour had 11, 397 when the total number left is 10, 510, leaving an over figure of 887.
“Apart from this surplus, we have not even calculated the votes of other political parties. We recall that yesterday you told us that ADC scored 1037.”
Mr Melaye told the INEC chairman that the figures did not add up, alleging that there was over-voting and the total number of votes for political parties outnumbered the number of accredited votes.