A
Senior Advocate of Nigeria, Festus Keyamo, has said that some videos
circulating on the social media purportedly showing how the February 23, 2019
presidential election was rigged are of no effect when weighed against the
provisions of the Electoral Act and INEC’s guidelines.
INEC
had declared candidate of the All Progressives Congress, Muhammadu Buhari,
winner of the election with 15,191,847 votes, as against PDP’s Atiku Abubakar’s
11,262,978 votes.
However,
the Peoples Democratic Party and Atiku claimed that some results purportedly
obtained from the INEC server showed that Atiku actually scored a total of
18,356,732 votes, and Buhari 16,741,430 votes.
Both
PDP and Atiku claim to be in possession of certain documents proving that he
won the presidential election overwhelmingly with 1.6m votes.
The
PDP and Atiku have since filed a petition, precisely on March 20, to challenge
President Buhari’s reelection, with APC and INEC as co-respondents.
In
their petition to the tribunal, PDP and Atiku deposed that some ad hoc staff
and other INEC officials, relying on the training/instruction by the first
respondent (INEC), transmitted the scores they got from the polling units to
INEC server.
Atiku
and PDP went on to list 13 ad hoc staff of INEC who all testified that they,
indeed, uploaded results from their polling units to the INEC server as
instructed during their training.
Atiku,
speaking through his lawyers at the tribunal led by Levi Uzoukwu (SAN), noted
that the results he allegedly obtained from the INEC server were neither false,
nor contrived, nor concocted.
In
a series of tweets on Thursday, Keyamo, who was Director, Strategic
Communications of President Buhari’s 2019 presidential campaign, took to his
verified Twitter handle @fkeyamo, warning that whatever video or evidence there
were, they could not withstand the provisions of the Electoral Act or those on
INEC guidelines.
Keyamo
tweeted: “Without referring to any particular pending Election Petition,
there’s a need to generally guide Nigerians not to gullibly fall for the
fantasy created by any video circulating where INEC official(s) spoke of INEC’s
plan to electronically transmit results before the elections.
“The
video(s) of some INEC official(s) expressing intention to electronically
transmit results are only circulated for entertainment. That procedure is
neither contained in the Electoral Act nor in INEC’s Guidelines. Courts are
only guided by these documents and not such videos.
Also,
what you plan to do may be different from what you actually did. Assuming INEC
planned to transmit electronically, the moment it said after the election that
it did not do so, the matter ends there, especially as the Electoral Act and
the guidelines do not allow it to do so.
“In
anticipation of the electronic transmission, some crooks concocted fictitious
results and perhaps in connivance with certain INEC insiders (or by hacking)
tried to upload those results into the server. The fact that electronic
transmission didn’t happen destroyed their plan
“The
irony is that the real cheats are the ones struggling to create a narrative
that they were cheated; the real crooks are the ones struggling to convince
everyone that the system is crooked; those who actually planned to steal the
people’s mandate are the ones crying foul.
“The
noise about electronic transmission of INEC results is akin to a student who
wants to cheat in an exam and enters the hall with prepared answers, not
noticing that the set questions are not exactly framed as expected.
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