Story By Jonathan LOIS
A group, Disaporans for Good Governance (DGG), has urged that the various systems used by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) for the conduct of the 2023 general election be subjected to a multi stakeholder audit and integrity test.
President of the group, Amb Camillus Konkwo in a press conference in Abuja on Tuesday said said such systems include the Automated Biometric Identification System (ABIS), the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS), the Automatic Finger identification System (AFIS), as well as the voter register among others.
Konkwo, who was represented by a member of the group, Chima Christian, said there was evidence that the systems were not as credible as advertised by INEC.
He said such an audit was necessary to restore Nigeria’s confidence in the entire electoral process.
He said, “The aim of this press conference is to draw attention to certain organizational and operational challenges that may impact the outcome and the credibility of the 2023 general elections. Through this press conference, the DGG, by that I mewan the Diaspora for Good Governance aspires to ignite a national conversation, national dialogue among various stakeholders including government, the political parties, their campaign councils, the civil society organizations, our development partners, the business community, the media, scientific community and indeed the general populace.
“Our hope is that we are able to mobilize their input to support INEC’s systems, and strengthen INEC’s systems and technical competencies and to motivate commitment and the highest level to promote better management of the 2023 elections. So some of us here are aware of the CVR exercise that ended June 2022, and the exercise started uJuly 2021. We looked at bteh voter revalidation data.
Out of 2.78 million Nigerians that were invalidated by INEC, we noticed that 49.3 percent of those are from the south south and southeast regions. Other regions of the country had an average rejection rate of 17 percent. Whereas the south east and the south south had an average rejection rate of 35.2 percent, almost twice that of the national average. And we have looked at the data and INEC says it used the ABIS system to do the invalidation based on the three criteria it listed on its website.
“One of which is double or multiple registrations, the second is visiibly undergae regeistrations and the third is outrightly fake registrations that did not meet INEC’s business rules. And we looked at these systems and we found out that the ABIS is not as credible and as efficient as advertised. One key example is to be found in the voter register that was just displayed. In that voter register, Nigerians saw multiple incidences of underaged registrations, outrightly fake registrations and some of these registrations that did not meet INEC’s business rules. And the DGG is saying with a compromise voter registers that the elections cannot be credible and if INEC is advertising ABIS as the software that it used to process all those all those registration requests, then what the voter register is suggesting to us is that he software is not as efficient as advertised because that same software that invalidated 1.78 million Niggeraiians previously failed to track and eliemitate teh multiple incidents of the underaeg voters as you can from the voter register that is displayed.
“It is on that, that we are calling on INEC and Nigerians to subject these systems to a multi stakeholder audit and integrity test because the only things Nigerians know about these systems are what INEC has told us and from what we know these systems are not working as advertised. We now know that the ABIS system, the BVAS system are not as efficient as advertised as evidenced by the multiple incidences of underage and outrightly fake registrations on the voter register.
“And then we are simulating a situation where if the south east and the south south presented an anomaly in the voter invalidation data by disagreeing with the national average of 17 percent and they have an average regional average of between the two of 35.2 percent. We are simulating a situation for instance where we have an average voting centre, polling unit in say Borno State, which has a voting strength of 500 and out of this number 300 show up on election day for verification and ABIS and BVAS system is able to verify 295 of those people and there is still a random polling station of equal voting strength anywhere in the south east or the south south, present the same 500 voters and tehmn 300 people show up for verification and ABIS is able to verify only say 150 of those, so we are imagining a situation where the BVAS would be made to work as the ABIS in the sense that it is not producing the same national average. That there area where the ABIS seems to be working well and there places it seems not to be working well.
“We are trying to draw attention to these issues and to insist that the BVAS should be subjected to a multi stakeholder independent audit. Not just BVAS, the ABIS, the AFIS System, the voter register and indeed all the whole gamut of the system, because with a compromised voter register, and with invisibly, because INEC did not provide clear justification as to why the south east and the south south had high rejection rate. So if the INEC ABIS system rejected a whole lot of voters from the south east and south south, we are suspecting that the BVAS would also fail to accredit high levels of voters from south east and south south. We are calling on Nigerians to urge INEC to subject all these systems to a credible integrity test to ascertain its authenticity and for Nigerians to put implicit confidence in the ability of the systems to hold credible elections in 2023.
“The second point is that we have looked at the PVC distribution date and we have agents working on the ground and we have seen that for instance in some local governments in Sokoto State, we have seen complaints form our field agents that INEC is engaged in discriminatory practices of issuing] PVCs to indidgencs and withholding PVCs of non indigenes in certain regions. We are calling on INEC. If indeed INEC has printed PVCs, why is it distributing PVCs according to region, places of origin or according to the name on the PVCs. These are some of the issues that might technically compromise the elections.
“Finally it is our belief that Nigeria has made significant improvements in election management and electoral laws since 1999 but it is not yet Uhuru, because from thuggery we move to Supreme Court snatching of ballot papers. Today we are in a place where INEC through its systems can technically suppress the votes of some regions and confer undue advantages to some regions.
“The BVAs software only records. It is an efficient software but can be improved upon, because of the key faults of that system is that it only records the number of concluded accreditations. But from what we saw in Anambra, Ekiti and Osun offseason elections they were a lot of people who presented validly issued INEC PVCs and IINEC BVAS could not accredit them, so we are saying that INEC should upgrade these systems to capture number of approved accreditations, so that when we finish the elections, Nigerians can indeed say that out of 100 people who attempted accreditations 50 were successfully accredited so that we can look at the success or failure rate of the BVAS and then we can subject that data to national and statewide spread so that as we look at the invalidation data from the AVBIS, then we are also able to look at the invalidation data from the BVAS to see that indeed the whole nation is presenting the same average, but if we see anomaly like we have seen, then that suggests the elections might have been technically compromised. We would use all the legal means to present these issues to all the critical stakeholders and then we now allow Nigerians to make their decisions.”
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