Nollywood actor cum politician, Kenneth Okonkwo, has accused the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) of deliberately manipulating the outcome of the 2023 presidential election.
Okonkwo, a spokesperson of the Labour Party (LP), stated that it was unfortunate that INEC is trivializing its inability to transmit, transfer or upload the results of the 2023 presidential election to the INEC Result Viewing (IReV) portal and server.
Information Nigeria reports that the LP chieftain made the submission while reacting to the INEC National Commissioner, Festus Okoye’s interview on Channels Television’s Politics Today on Thursday night.
As reported earlier by this platform, Okoye stated that Nigerians should not judge the commission’s performance in the 2023 polls simply based on the challenge experienced in the upload of the presidential election results to its viewing portal.
He had said: “It is not fair to judge the entire performance of the commission on the basis of a glitch in the result upload for the presidential election.
“Almost all the political parties nominated and got accredited at least over 170,000 polling agents. What that means is that they had primary evidence of the results from the polling units.
“It is those results from the polling units, together with the BVAS as a machine itself that goes to the collation centre. So, it is not true for a political party to rely only on result upload in order to get the evidence with which it wants to prosecute its case in court.”
Okoye added during the interview that political parties contesting the outcome of the election should not only rely on electronically uploaded results as they all had agents at the various polling units who supervised the process.
However, when asked by media personality, Seun Okinbaloye to explain what caused the glitch, he stated that he doesn’t know much about technology and can’t delve into that.
In reaction however, Okonkwo vehemently disagreed with Okoye’s submission, stating that the views of the INEC spokesperson fall below expectations and confirmed that there was a deliberate attempt to manipulate the 2023 presidential election results.
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He said: “I just finished watching Festus Okoye, INEC Commissioner for voter education, on Politics Today, Channels TV, 29th June 2023, at 7pm, and the interview has reinforced the long-held conclusion that INEC manipulated the election to declare their preferred candidate in the presidential election.
“Firstly Lawyers are called “Learned” because they understand little of every discipline and researches where to get the answers to every question. This is why they can defend Doctors, Engineers, Scientists etc in court.
“It was nauseating that till date, four months after the presidential election, the “Learned” Festus Okoye confessed on public TV that he doesn’t know what caused the non-transmission or transfer or non-uploading of the presidential election results on IREV Portal and the Server because it was technical.
“Meanwhile, the same Okoye, who has not been in the Presidential Election Petition Court, claimed that he knew what was going on in Court, while he doesn’t know what went wrong with transmission of results even when he was present in the situation room. Isn’t it a shame that Okoye admitted they couldn’t transmit the presidential results but was calling the failure as “only” presidential election.
“This election that was the most important election is referred to as “only” by the failed INEC. He claimed that INEC supplied all documents and obeyed all subpoenas by the court, which was a lie.
“INEC even openly told the court that some of the documents were not in existence. INEC even refused to accept the subpoena from a court Baliff to foist on the Petitioners a faith accompli.
“It’s unfortunate that in addition to the failure of INEC to do its duties in accordance with the law, Festus Okoye is lying on top of it. Okoye revealed that Adamawa REC may soon be charged to court, but till date nobody has been held responsible for not transmitting and uploading presidential results.
“With incompetent and dishonest people like this in INEC, it will be difficult for us to make progress in Nigeria. If Adamawa REC is a demon, INEC leadership in Abuja are Devils.”
