The logic is simple. The 2019 presidential election in Nigeria cannot be, by all accounts, the worst election in the history of Nigeria without the corresponding INEC chairman being, at the same time, the worst INEC chairman in the history of Nigeria. INEC chairman, Mahmood Yakubu, presided over an atrocious and fraudulent election that is now being fiercely contested in the courts. He can no longer remain as INEC chairman.
INEC is supposed to be an impartial umpire in elections in Nigeria. However, it is now obvious that Mahmood Yakubu’s INEC operated essentially as an arm of the ruling APC. The evidence is overwhelming that Yakubu’s INEC massively rigged the election in favour of the government. If integrity and impartiality is to be restored to INEC, Yakubu must leave immediately. If the confidence of Nigerians is to be restored in INEC, then the country deserves a complete overhaul of the organisation.
INEC Shenanigans
INEC, under Mahmood Yakubu, has lost all credibility. It is now practically impossible to believe anything that comes from the organisation. The election results it declared defied commonsense. The figures did not add up. The election was not even rigged intelligently. It was rigged on the presumption of impunity.
In many cases no voters were accredited, nevertheless fictitious returns were made. In others, total votes cast far exceeded registered voters. In Borno, for example, only 372,347 votes were cast. However, 919,786 votes were declared; an inflation of 547,439 votes. The printing of election materials was contracted to the company of a member of the APC, who was also one of the party’s senatorial candidates.
Before the election, the use of card readers was declared to be mandatory. It was affirmed that the vote would be declared null and void where the card reader was not used. Nevertheless, in most areas of the North, the card reader was not used. The votes were simply inflated and deflated at INEC’s discretion.
In areas of opposition PDP strength, elections were strategically cancelled and supplementary elections scheduled. This ultimately enabled INEC to declare losers as winner and to convert winners into losers; as happened for example in Kano.
But what has proved to be the most indicting of INEC has been the question of the central server. Having somehow obtained the result posted on the INEC central server, Atiku has demonstrated that it is completely different from the result INEC declared publicly. On the INEC server, Atiku prevailed over Buhari by a plurality of 1.6 million votes; while INEC publicly declared that Buhari won the election by nearly 4 million votes.
Atiku Must Be Stopped
When the APC discovered to its dismay that Atiku had access to the INEC central server and had somehow obtained the real and authentic results of the 2019 presidential election, it went into panic mode. The party’s first knee-jerk response was to petition the police to arrest Atiku for hacking into the INEC server. But if Atiku did in fact hack into the server, what does that mean for the results he found there? The afterthought was to insist Atiku posted fake results into the server.
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