There are indications that Presidency is worried about the tardiness with which the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, handled the 2019 Presidential elections which, though the APC presidential Candidate, Muhammadu Buhari, was returned, has left many loose ends untied.
Recall that President Muhammadu Buhari beat his closest rival, Atiku Abubakar, the People’s Democratic Party, PDP, with about four million votes. Later the same day after the announcement of the results, Buhari received the certificate of return as the President elect.
But more than a week after the certificate of return was handed over to the President, INEC declared that there is going to be a rerun in some areas where the results were cancelled due to electoral violence. An example of such area is Rivers state.
But the worry is that, even as the presidential election has come and gone, INEC is still collating results from polling units. A visit to the INEC website indicates that the results are yet to be uploaded to the website.
It will again be recalled that the INEC website was pulled down as the collation of the presidential election was going on; a situation that the opposition parties insisted was deliberately orchestrated to rig the elections.
Sources indicate that since Atiku defied all entreaties and went to challenge the election results in court, there has been disquiet in presidential quarters over the order of the Abuja based Court of Appeal to INEC to give Atiku access to the electoral materials to be used in the prosecution of their cases. This, it was learnt, has thrown INEC into confusion. “We are still authenticating results from the units till now”, an INEC source said.
As at press time, INEC is yet to publish results from wards, local governments, federal constituencies, senatorial districts and states either at their website or state offices.
