A former National Commissioner of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Mustapha Lecky, claims that officials in the Commission’s Information Communication Technology (ICT) branch lack the expertise to deal with any technological disruption in their system.
He claimed that INEC over-promised by claiming that it will broadcast election results in real time, and that the electoral umpire should have stayed with the manual procedure because technology is not yet mature.
“They tried those things in the US (United States), you saw what happened, they were hacking it. So, how many people do you have in the INEC? I worked in INEC, I know the ICT guys, good guys, good ladies that work there, they are not as resilient to be able to rise up to the challenge if their system is being hacked,” he said on Channels Television’s Politics Today on Tuesday.
“The staff there don’t have that kind of competence to be able to respond to any manner of disruption technologically. Just (a) few guys that are there, you talk about advanced countries like the US that were struggling and then you are talking about Nigeria, how are they going to rise to it?
“So, the issue of over-promising damaged the reputation of INEC and that should not have happened.”
The former INEC commissioner insisted that the Commission should not have promised what it was not capable of delivering considering the uncertainties surrounding the Nigerian political situation.
Before the 2023 general elections, INEC had promised to transmit results electronically from the polling units to enhance the transparency of the electoral process.
While the Commission successfully transmitted other results, those of the presidential election of February 25, 2023 were not transmitted in real time, with many accusing the electoral body of compromise.
The Commission had since debunked the allegation of compromise but said that a technical glitch was responsible for the non-transmission of the presidential election results from the polling units to its Result Viewing Portal (IReV).