2019 Election Server: INEC denies resignation of ICT director

 

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) on Saturday said the purported resignation of its director of information and communication technology, Chidi Nwafor, is fake news and should be disregarded.

The commission made this known on its official Twitter handle, @inecnigeria. This refutation may not be unconnected with the contention regarding whether INEC used a server in transmitting 2019 presidential election results or not.

The Peoples Democratic Party and its presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, are claiming INEC transferred the election results using a server.

It described the report as false, urging members of the public to disregard it.

“The rumour circulating that our Director ICT, Engr. Chidi Nwafor has resigned is totally false and should be disregarded.

“The Director and another staff have just returned from South Africa where they represented INEC at the high-level 5th Annual Meeting of ID4Africa Movement in Johannesburg (from June 18 to June 20).

“Neither he nor any senior staff has resigned his appointment or indicated such intention, since the elections,” INEC tweeted.

Recently, SaharaReporters reported that a joint committee of information technology and legal experts has claimed to have incontrovertible evidence about Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) servers, installed in 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Abuja.

The groups, Deservation, and Pukka Initiative, made the revelation in Yola, Thursday night, showing a document, that detailed how and when INEC server was allegedly installed and put to use.

Dr. Sani Adamu, who spoke for the two groups, said, “Apart from the incontrovertible facts our IT and legal teams have in their possession, and ready to bring to the attention of the tribunal, I wish to present to you another evidence obtainable by FoI.”

Quoting the INEC chairman, Prof. Yakub Mahmood, Adamu stated the electoral body’s chairman had publicly declared that “we are pioneering and deploying in 2019 general elections, a new platform for the electronic Collation and transmission of results of the 2019 elections”.

The opposition People’s Democratic Party and its candidate Atiku Abubakar had filed an application seeking access to inspect the server and data of smart card readers used by the electoral body in the conduct of the election.

In their petition, they stated that by the figures obtained from INEC’s server, they won the presidential election against Buhari and the third respondent, All Progressives Congress (APC).

Based on the figures allegedly obtained from the server, Abubakar said he scored 18,356,732 votes as against those of Buhari, who he said polled 16,741,430 votes.

“The servers from which the said figures were derived belong to the first respondent (INEC). The figures and votes were transmitted to the first respondent’s Presidential Result’s Server 1 and, thereafter, aggregated in INEC_PRES_RSLT_SRV2019, whose physical address or unique Mac address is 94-57-A5-DC-64-B9 with Microsoft Product ID 00252-7000000000-AA535. The above descriptions are unique to the 15th respondent’s server,” Abubakar claimed.

Abubakar alleged that the INEC chairman “committed grave errors in the final collation exercise” for the election by “falsely crediting” some persons with political parties, including “Okotie Christopher, Reverend Dr. Onwubuya and Ojinika Jeff Chinze.”

Uche told the tribunal that the inspection of the server and data was necessary for the interest of justice, transparency and neutrality on the part of the first respondents, INEC.

But the INEC counsel, Yunus Usman (SAN), vehemently opposed the application for the inspection of the server. He said that the application should be dismissed because “We do not have a server.”

Usman also said that the Court of Appeal in an enrolled order of March 6, 2019, refused all the prayers in the said application. He maintained that the court, having refused the prayers, lacked jurisdiction to revisit it.

The lead counsel to President Buhari, Wole Olanipekun (SAN) and the counsel to the APC, Lateef Fagbemi (SAN), also made a similar argument in opposing the application for inspection.

Olanipekun told the tribunal that it lacked jurisdiction to overrule itself while Fagbemi urged the panel to be wary of making an order that it is not capable of enforcing, because INEC had said it had no server.

Consequently, the five-man panel led by Justice Mohammed Garba announced reservation of ruling in the application to a date to be communicated to the parties. He then adjourned the pre-hearing of Atiku and PDP’s petition till June 24.