The presidential candidate of the African Action Congress, Omoyele Sowore, has said that the Independent National Electoral Commission is not prepared for the forthcoming general elections in February and March.
The #RevolutionNow convener said this on Wednesday, during an interview on ‘The Rountable’, a program organized by The PUNCH.
Sowore insisted that while Nigerians are expecting INEC to hold elections on the scheduled dates, they can not be forced to do so.
He cited an instance that happened during the Osun elections in July 2022, where he logged in to INEC’s website for the election results but the website had no capacity to handle the large traffic of people trying to access it and this made it difficult to get timely results.
He stated, “What are they going to do during the main election when over 50 million people will be trying to access the website at the same time at home and abroad.
“They are not ready. That’s the truth.”
He further cited previous inconsistencies with the electoral body which informed his statement that they are not ready.
He said, “I participated in the 2019 election, and I can say it categorically as I say it everywhere, there was no election in 2019. But this is how it started: I was waiting in my village for the election and INEC just suddenly, on the eve of the election, postponed the election by, I think, two weeks.
“In 2015, election was also postponed for security reasons. Why were they talking about postponing the election when the governor of Borno State said 90 per cent of the state was free from Boko Haram control? If you ask me, it’s not true. But what they are telling you is that 90 per cent of Borno is free for rigging so that they will bring their big numbers from all those fake places where they claim that people are voting whereas there are no people living in those areas.
“Most importantly, it shows that INEC cannot be trusted because INEC is an incompetent electoral body and I have said this for too many times.
“It doesn’t matter how you look at it, elections that have been organised by INEC always had hiccups. Even in Osun where they claimed that their BVAS, that is their magic wand, worked, we hear about over-voting, we hear about over-registration, and all those electoral malpractices that they claimed the BVAS had resolved.”
