Conference Of Nigeria Political Parties (CNPP) has called on the Nigerian judiciary to serve justice to all electoral petitions by aggrieved parties in the February 25 presidential and National Assembly elections, urging the Judges and Justices to do better than the electoral umpire, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).
In a statement signed by its Secretary General, Chief Willy Ezugwu, the CNPP warned that “the current peace of the grave yard in the country must not be abused.”
The CNPP said that it did not want “to rush into joining issues with some selfish individuals and groups who ignored voter intimidation as well as unexplainable failure on the part of presiding officers employed by INEC to transmit election results from their polling units in real-time despite several assurances that electronic transmission of results has come to stay in the country’s electoral system.
“The CNPP recalls that in the build up to the 2023 general elections, INEC had consistently assured that results from the polling units in locations without internet services will automatically be uploaded by the Biometric Voters Accreditation System (BVAS) machines to the INEC IREV servers as soon as the BVAS is connected to internet network.
“But it is shocking that INEC failed to upload the results to its IREV servers even in urban cities where there were sufficient Internet network connections across the country.
“We believe, like most observers of the process leading to the declaration of the winner of the presidential election, that the delay in uploading the results of the presidential election in real-time as INEC did in Edo, Ondo and Ekiti states in previous elections was deliberate to ensure the emergence of a predetermined outcome through manual collation of the presidential election results.
“We therefore call on the international community and lovers of democracy across the world to hold the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Prof. Mahmood Yakubu responsible for the observable manipulations of the collation process, especially the presidential election.
“It is on record that the CNPP stood with INEC leadership during the struggle for the amendment of the Electoral Act 2022 to provide for the deployment of technology to deepen democracy in Nigeria.
“But, it is disappointing to observe that the same INEC, which electronically transmitted results successfully in precious staggered elections, suddenly lost its vigor to do the same during the presidential election, resorting to the old fraud-prone manual collation of the 2023 presidential election results.
“We call on Nigerians not to feel frustrated by the observations suggesting the manipulation of the electoral system in the presidential election and come out en masse to vote for the candidates of their choice in the March 11, 2023 governorship and state legislative elections.
“We urge the Nigerian judiciary to do the needful and reject the usual reliance on technicalities to deny litigants justice in election petitions”, the CNPP stated.
