Lagos State’s general elections are hardly transparent or free. From the beginning, the electoral process was doomed to fail. For instance, one would expect that INEC would have made appropriate provisions for its staff and the security of elections in Lagos West, the largest senatorial constituency in the Southwest with more than 7,000 polling units out of the state’s 13,000, and 10 local governments out of the state’s 20.
The introduction of the Bimodal Voters Registration technology is intended to FastTrack the voting system and to put an end to the collation problem we were dealing with for years. What happened on Saturday was quite different; according to INEC, the election was supposed to begin at 8:00 a.m., and INEC staff were supposed to be in the polling units; however, the INEC agents did not arrive at their polling units until 12:00 p.m., disenfranchising a large number of voters even before the election began.
The BVAS also stopped working in a lot of places—Alimosho, Ikeja, Oshodi-Isolo— and all way to get it back up was impossible. INEC officials had to take the electoral machine to their offices, bring it back around 3:00 p.m. and concluded voting by 6:00 p.m.
In Oshodi-Isolo, Ikeja L.G.A and Mushin Local governments, there were security issues, the BVAS was destroyed, many voters were chased out of their polling units, and the process was disrupted. There are various videos on the internet showing this abnormality (https://www.instagram.com/p/CpFdszsNgkq/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y= https://www.instagram.com/reel/CpFfSFXgtoH/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=).
Indubitably, a woman was beaten to a pulp just for trying to exercise her voting right. The election was brutal, the ruling party APC made sure of it. People were chased away from their Polling Units in Ikeja Local Government if asked their choice of the vote and they don’t mention APC.
INEC Adhoc staff were stationed in various polling units around Ifako-Ijaiye Local Government. In accordance with the INEC register, voters were waiting for INEC authorities at the polling center while officials were setting up in another polling unit. It took a lot of effort and investigation to return the INEC agent to the original polling units.
At exactly 2:20 p.m. on Saturday, 25th February, the IREV website underwent a technical glitch as claimed by INEC and was unavailable to the public for over an hour. We believe what INEC has described as a technical glitch is not a technical glitch but an override manipulation by APC to disrupt the credibility of the election and make the IREV inaccessible for the BVAS knowing that if IREV is unavailable for upload, INEC will be forced to revert back to a manual collation of its result. Manual collation helps the APC perfect their rigging since most of the results have been written already at home. The results presented at collation centers were written from home and do not tally with what was obtained at the polls.
The essence of the BVAS is to allow INEC ADHOC staff to take a picture of the results once voting is done and upload it on IREV for the purpose of credibility. However, for the majority of the polling units, results were not uploaded by the BVAS even 48 hours after the election in Lagos West, only 3,000 results have been uploaded. The results that were presented by all party agents are different from what INEC is presenting as its results. So many results were not signed by polling unit agents, and INEC is officially adopting these results.
The election was disrupted in a lot of polling units by thugs and paid security to avoid INEC officials from having a concluding result. In Alimosho, and Ojo local governments, Polling unit agents were beaten and chased out of their different polling units by security agents https://www.instagram.com/reel/CpFVc6wAp51/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y= https://www.instagram.com/reel/CpFxd6zAj7z/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y= , and elections in these places were inconclusive. However, it is quite unfortunate to later find out that the results were presented at INEC.
In other Polling units where results were changed, Polling Unit agents left angrily because they were been asked to sign false results. These results were eventually signed by APC agents who signed for all the agents, which we found out at the ward collation office.
With these many unsettling news of malignment, result manipulation and massive disenfranchisement, what result is INEC then accepting as original when even INEC itself does not have original results as supported by the IREV?
Segun Ogundairo
For: Lagos West Election Observers Situation Room