By Afolasade Osigwe
More stakeholders are being equipped with necessary information ahead of the 2023 general election.
Among them are journalists and members of Civil Society Organizations in Southwest being trained on conflict-sensitive reporting, 2023 general elections and countering fake news organized by the Centre for Democracy and Development, CDD, in collaboration with the INEC and NUJ in Lagos.
While speaking on the key issues in the Electoral Act 2022, the Senior Program Officer of the Centre for Democracy and Development, CDD, Mr Austin Aigbe confirmed that the INEC would transmit results from the polling units, electronically, with an assurance that the electronic transmission of results would not tamper with the collation of results.
Mr Aigbe advised members of the public to disregard rumours targeted at discrediting the INEC’s efforts towards ensuring credible and transparent elections in 2023.
“The result will not move from the IREV; the INEC Results from Viewing Portal straight to the national, it will still follow the manual processing, however, the transparency hub is the IREV and every citizen can have access to the IREV to actually check the result from their polling units and use that to match the one they see online when there are discrepancies they can blow the whistle”.Mr. Aigbe explained.
He added that gaining access to the IREV was easy just as creating an account on social media platforms and once registered, such citizens can access results from all the polling units in Nigeria without delay.
He said it was important that the people had knowledge and fact about the electoral process.
Mr Aigbe also made a case for the full participation of all stakeholders in electing the nation’s leaders.
He noted that the number of those on election assignments was huge and should be allowed to vote either before or while carrying out their monitoring and observation duties.
“Overtime we have seen that media, CSOs who monitor elections don’t vote and critically, if you look at that number, it’s a huge number and that also includes police army, election officials, for example, INEC will be deployed over a million Ad-Hoc staff, that means that over that one million people will not vote, let’s get them to vote because whoever becomes president, or governor, senator or house of representatives or even state assembly officials will rule over us”. Aigbe said.
Participants were taken through the roles and duties of each stakeholder in the Electoral process and how the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, BVAS works.
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