The Labour Party (LP), African Democratic Congress (ADC) and Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) have asked the chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Yakubu Mahmoud to resign.
Mahmoud started to receive the results of the presidential election from different states on Sunday.
The presidential elections were held on Saturday across Nigeria and counting and collation started immediately.
However, LP, PDP, and ADC are not happy with the way the collaging delivery of results are happening.
They have called for the resignation of the chairperson of the electoral umpire.
The parties at a press conference in Abuja also demanded that the presidential election be conducted afresh.
They alleged that the presidential and National Assembly elections were manipulated by INEC officials at polling units by their failure to upload results electronically on the commission’s Results Viewing Portal (IReV).
LP National chairman Julius Abure who spoke on behalf of the LP, PDP, and the ADC said the election is “not free and far from being fair”.
He added that there are “ongoing cancellation of results from areas of strength of the opposition parties”.
The parties heads declared a vote of no confidence on the INEC chairperson.
Afterwards, they asked him to immediately step aside for an unbiased person to take over and conduct a fresh election.
Electronic Upload Of Results
The LP, PDP, and ADC said the deliberate refusal of the INEC chairman to respect and follow through with the electronic upload of results as stipulated by Section 60 of the Electoral Act 2022 is unacceptable.
The three parties said the result receive at the collation centre so far, has shown “monumental disparities” between what the party agents signed and what INEC officials announced in Abuja.
They said the manual transmission of results compromised the integrity of the election process.
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INEC has promised that as soon as results were counted in polling units, they would be uploaded at the polling unit level.
However, even up until the time the results were being received at the collation centre in Abuja, most of the results were not uploaded.
The Melaye Drama
Dino Melaye, who is from Kogi State, complained about the lack of upload of results.
He asked Mr Mahmoud to ask the Resident Electoral Commissioners (RECs) and the State Collation Officer for the Presidential election (SCOPs) coming to present their results to first confirm that the results had been uploaded.
Melaye argued that without the upload of results electronically on IReV, this year’s election is not in any way different from the manual transmission of results done in past years.
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However, the INEC chairman cautioned Melaye not to be “disruptive” of the collation process.
Melaye and a former governor of Imo State, Emeka Ihedioha; an agent of the Labour Party, amongst others staged a walkout on the INEC chairman to express dissatisfaction.
