Presidential Election Results Were Manipulated — Femi Falana Opens Up
A Nigerian senior lawyer and political activist, Femi Falana (SAN), has said that the 2023 presidential election was marred by result manipulations.
Falana stated that other factors that marred the elections included insecurity, late arrival of materials, violence and thuggary.
Falana said, “The presidential and National Assembly elections were marred by insecurity in many places, late arrival of materials, violence and thuggary and manipulation of the results.
“INEC has admitted that there were logistic and technological challenges. Nobody is saying that the election was perfectly conducted. There are challenges.
“INEC should go back to the drawing table and fine-tune its strategy. They said they painstakingly made plans to conduct elections, but the implementation had some challenges. To me, this is an admission on the part of INEC.”
Recalls INEC has declared Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) as the winner of the 2023 presidential election.
However, the two other leading political parties in the election, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the Labour Party (LP), have since rejected the results, Insisting that each of them won the election
The leadership of the two opposition parties at several press briefings had called on INEC and protested the manual transmission of results.
The parties said the results by INEC showed “monumental disparities” between what the party agents signed and what INEC officials announced in Abuja and asked Mahmood to respect the upload of results electronically as stipulated by recommended by the law.
They said the manual transmission of results compromised the integrity of the election process and demanded a cancellation of the election and asked the electoral chief to step down.
According to the aggrieved parties, INEC violated the new electoral law by failing to uploaded results before collation.
The opposition parties thus questioned the integrity of the collation and announcement exercise at the national collation centre in Abuja.
They alleged that INEC officials connived with some candidates of the ruling All Progressive Congress(APC) to mutilate results and re-write the results.
The aggrieved parties also claimed that INEC staff jettisoned the electronic accreditation in some places and used manual accreditation which has been outlawed by the electoral act.
