The behaviour of some educated Nigerians when it comes to national
issues is outrightly incomprehensible. Must we always view critical
issues within our partisan political frames rather than being broad
enough to call a spade a spade and not a farm implement? Is it right to
condone a criminal behaviours and rationalise obvious aberrations in our
polity simply because it favours you politically?
The Presidential Election Petition Tribunal (PEPT) Monday 24 June 2019,
refused to grant the application filed by Atiku Abubakar and the Peoples
Democratic Party (PDP) for access to inspect the server and data of
smart card readers used by the Independent National Electoral Commission
(INEC) for the presidential election of February 23, 2019.
And without ambiguity, the five-man panel headed by Justice Mohammed
Garba averred that granting the application would imply that the
tribunal had delved into and resolved the contentious issue of the
existence of a central server at INEC which the commission has come out
on oath to deny.
In the unanimous decision, the tribunal declined granting the
application on the grounds that since parties had joined issues, the
court could not at the interlocutory stage make an order that would
affect the substantive issue.
In the main ruling the chairman of the tribunal, Justice Mohammed Garba,
held that the matter being a substantive issue for determination by the
tribunal cannot be determined at the interlocutory stage.
“Doing so would further create the impression that the tribunal had
concluded that there was a central INEC server where results and data of
the February 23 election were received and stored,” it was said.
The hearing of the substantive petition hasn’t started yet. The
Tribunal is only dealing with pre-hearing motions first. The PDP and its
presidential candidate asked to inspect the server, INEC lied it
doesn’t have a server: witnesses haven’t been called by either
party. So the request turned down by the panel is routine.
Hope everyone now understands what the court said and why?
Is it not surprising that even some well- educated Nigerians joined the
bandwagon to support and rationalise INEC’s denial of having a backend
server? And as said by an analyst, “citizens are in a heated debate;
checking up the definition of “server” from their partisan
encyclopaedia.” How can we continue like this as a country?
The idea of using automated processing of votes cast predates Mohammadu
Buhari as President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. So it’s not a
Buhari issue. Furthermore the use of card readers for the collation of
the results of the 2019 elections featured very significantly in the
public pronouncements and presentations of the INEC Chairman and his
agency’s management.
So how they now turn to say they do not have servers and/or there was no
server that results were transmitted to meaning no server was used for
the purposes of result collation, at best remains inexplicable.
INEC has now said they have no server and “They are asking us to bring
something we do not have.”_Haba_! And this was averred to and deposed
to on oath at the Election Tribunal contrary to what the average
Nigerian knows! Is this not a ridiculous explanation in a country that
appropriated so much for elections? The question now is what happened to
the servers INEC procured and trained its staff to use for the
elections?
If card reader cannot communicate with a backend computer database, how
do you accredit and validate the Permanent Voter’s Card (PVC) without
such data pool? If you put a debit card in a POS machine and there is no
network to connect the card to the bank data base, will the card work?
So how did you accredit the PVCs without backend network database?
It would be recalled that President Buhari had, in July and September
2018, written to the National Assembly requesting for N242 billion as
virement and supplementary budget to fund the 2019 general election. Out
of this amount, N188.9 billion was allocated to INEC while the rest went
to the Nigeria Police, Civil Defence, and other security agencies.
In October, the National Assembly approved the N242 billion
supplementary budget as sent by the president – only changing the source
of the funding from the legislators’ special projects votes to the
Special Intervention Programme.”
Does the supplementary budget provide for servers? Yes, it did. INEC’s
supplementary budget was made public by the Policy and Legal Advocacy
Centre (PLAC), a non-profit organisation committed to facilitating
legislative advocacy and access to public policies.
The document as displayed by PLC show that INEC proposed to spend N143.5
billion on 209 items. Out of that amount, N2.27 billion was budgeted for
server-related procurement items, with budget code 230808. The purpose
of a computer server is simply to store, retrieve, and send information
to other computers connected to a network.”
Of the amount, N1.37 billion was budgeted for nationwide replacement of
servers for 25 states and National Data Centre, N99.7 million for an
upgrade of the server version of OpenVR for compatibility with new Dell
server, and N800 million for the migration of voter registration
database from MySQL Open Source to OracleDB (both database
administration services).
INEC also budgeted N157.5 million for the renewal and maintenance of
cloud infrastructure, with budget code 230709.
Not only was the approval absolute, but the office of the
Accountant-General reports in its “Capital Performance of the
Budget” document that all of the amount (N188.9 billion) was released
to INEC and spent by it.
It is true that money (over N2 billion naira) for the procurement and
upgrade of servers was approved for INEC by the National Assembly and it
has had a long term plan favouring the electronic storage of electoral
results.
The amount was also released to INEC and the commission reported it as
utilised. If the agency insists it does not have a server, then it has
some explaining to do on how exactly it spent the relevant funds.
Getting this server issue in proper context will help us understand this
matter better: In 2011 and 2015 elections, technology was not part of
the legal framework for elections in Nigeria but the courts granted
access for forensic audit of electoral materials.
But now that technology (Smart card reader/electronic voting) is part of
our legal framework, it behoves on INEC to grant access to inspect all
systems used. If there were manipulations of any kind of election data,
it is only through forensics that such manipulations would be
ascertained or disproved. So why is INEC refusing access to its
electronic database?
The Judiciary as the last bastion of hope for Nigeria and Nigerians who
went out to vote and believe their votes counted should not allow this
server issue make us the laughing stock of the world. God bless Nigeria!
(IFEANYI IZEZE WRITES FROM ABUJA: IIZEZE@YAHOO.COM; 234-8033043009)