Jega blamed desperate politicians for allegedly attempting to infiltrate IReV and BVAS during the last general elections.
Professor Attahiru Jega, the former Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), has insisted that the electoral commission needs to explain to Nigerians why its Result Viewing Portal (IReV) and the Bimodal Voter Registration Systems (BVAS) failed during the 2023 general elections.
The February 2023 presidential and National Assembly polls were marred by the controversies resulting from the failure of INEC officials to upload polling unit results to IReV in real time.
The development cast a shadow of credibility over the whole exercise, as opposition parties kicked against the manual collation of results and the announcement of winners at the polls.
The Chairman of the commission, Professor Mahmood Yakubu, explained at the time that the two technological interventions failed due to attempts by hackers to infiltrate its server and compromise the election results.
However, Yakubu’s explanation lacked the context and details some Nigerians were clamouring for to make sense of the situation.
Meanwhile, nearly a year after the exercise, Jega, who superintended over the 2011 and 2015 general elections in Nigeria, said though INEC meant well, some politicians circumvented the entire IReV and BVAS systems.
The former Vice-Chancellor of Bayero University, Kano, said this while speaking on Inside Sources on Channels Television on Friday, January 26, 2024.
He blamed desperate politicians for allegedly attempting to infiltrate the technological systems introduced by INEC for the accreditation and electronic transmission of votes in the last elections.
Jega said, “In 2023, INEC did its best under very difficult circumstances and a lot of these difficult circumstances were caused by the mindset of our selfish politicians who wanted to win by hook or by crook.
“INEC has overtime introduced technology to make the process of election results very transparent with integrity but from my own experience when I was in INEC from 2011 to 2015, and I suspect that a lot of that has continued to be so up to 2023, our reckless politicians try to be a step ahead of INEC; if you introduce something today and you try it, they try to be a step ahead of you and beat it by the next election. And of course, they can also use ways and means to not only truncate but also bypass something that has actually been put legitimately in order to add to the integrity of the process.
“If you ask my opinion, I feel very strongly that INEC needs to tell us more about what happened with the IReV. In fact, at one point, I was even calling for a thorough public inquiry about what happened with regards to IReV. I feel that something has happened, that in spite of the confidence and the very articulate manner the INEC chairman (Mahmood Yakubu) had spoken about the IReV and it then failed.
“I believe that some of our reckless politicians may have infiltrated it and truncated it but INEC will take the blame for that.”
The former INEC boss said that once the court cases are resolved, “we need to go back to the bottom of what happened with the IReV.”
