Don’t Repeat Your Mistakes, ActionAid Tells INEC

As Nigerians head to polls for the gubernatorial election in 28 states, ActionAid Nigeria has urged the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), to ensure that the many challenges that marred the credibility of the Presidential election are handled.

The country representative of the agency, Mrs Ene Obi, who made the call while addressing journalists in Abuja, said INEC must give special attention to the gubernatorial and the state houses of assembly elections.

She said women should not give up because they are fighting for their children, adding that, “we are fighting for humanity. Women, we do not have a tribe, we don’t have political parties, our party is humanity, our tribe is also humanity.

“Let’s focus on the governorship election. Let’s see what will happen here because deployment is going to the States already earlier than normal time so let’s hope that this is going to work.

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“When we discovered that INEC was not going to transmit the election results through the IReV portal, we reported the matter to INEC and the INEC chairman granted a press conference, stating that it was fake news. Everyone saw what happened with the presidential election.

I don’t want us to go out of here expecting that INEC did not envisage anything that happened during the presidential election. How did INEC get National Assembly results uploaded without a problem and what happened to presidential results? Ene asked, urging the commission not to disappoint Nigerians for a second time.

ActionAid Nigeria Digital technology manager, Charles Petu said INEC explained to us what BVAS is expected to do and they want the result to be transmitted but what they did not envisage is, there might be network failure and most of the polling unit our observer reported that they experienced network failure.

“We look at a situation where INEC would have envisaged that and make alternative arrangements because in technology we deploy what we call diversity. Diversity in communication means if one device fails, there should be a backup. So INEC should have anticipated a backup mechanism to upload results, if there was a failure of one there should be an alternative,” he said.

On her part, ActionAid Nigeria, Director of the programmes, Hajiya Suwaiba Dankabo, said: “The integrity of elections should not rest on technology alone. The integrity of the election was far beyond the technology which can experience failure at any time, the human being operates the technology and if you want to operate the technology, let’s put our eyes on how the technology is supported, to give us what we want.”