The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has assured Nigerians that there is no going back on the electronic transmission of results on the IREV portal for the March 18 governorship election.
the commission also justified the transfer of its director in charge of Information Communication Technology (ICT), Chidi Nwafor, who was transferred a few months before the 2023 general elections.
Speaking on a television programme, INEC National Commissioner, Festus Okoye, attributed INEC’s inability to transmit polling units results directly to its portal in real time as it promised before the presidential elections to “technical glitches” which he said have been rectified ahead of the March 18 governorship and state assembly elections.
He assured Nigerians that the commission’s Result Viewing Portal (IReV) will be functional during the March 18 elections.
On the controversial transfer of Chidi Nwafor, the INEC ICT director to Enugu few months to the election, Okoye insisted that the commission is built in a way that no department is wrapped around an individual.
According to him, “The present leadership of the commission wants to build a professional organisation that is not wrapped around one individual. The individual (Nwafor) mentioned is a very good friend of mine; he is a director in the commission and any director can be posted out or to go and become an administrative secretary,” Okoye said.
“Now the time we readjusted the list of administrative secretaries was the time the commission was slightly panicky on whether we were going to have new resident electoral commissioners and we were preparing for elections.
“So, the commission decided in its wisdom that we are going to post our best hands to the various states as administrative secretaries to go and prepare the states for the purposes of election and that was exactly what the commission did.
“We have a department in charge of ICT and the Chidi I know tried to build a department that can stand on its own whether he is there or not and that is the same thing with every department,” he added.