February 25 2023 elections: NNPP demands cancellation, fresh election

The New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP) has chided the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) for alleged failures in the last Saturdays presidential elections in the country.

According to the NNPP, the election management body has taken the country back to pre-2014 era where ballot-snatching, vote buying, connivance of security agents among other negativity were the norm in the conduct of elections.

The party, therefore, called for the immediate cancellation of the February 25, 2023 presidential election. 

NNPP’s national chairman, Professor Rufai Ahmed Alkali, who stated this at a press briefing in Abuja on Tuesday, stated that the election was marred by various irregularities such as vote buying, violence, voters’ disenfranchisement, Bimodal Voters’ Accreditation System (BVAS) malfunctioning, among others.

He accused INEC of of displaying incomprehensible hostility towards the NNPP, saying that from  the conduct of the party’s congresses and conventions to the conduct of primary elections, the party had suffered unnecessary and unexplainable resistance and outright sabotage from INEC both at state and national levels. 

He noted that the most disturbing one was when INEC shut the party from submitting the party’s candidates onto its server days before the deadline. 

Alkali said: “We have returned to the era where people who do not participate in an election are declared winners of the election. For instance, in Kano Ibrahim Shekarau who formally resigned from the NNPP, withdrew from the race, registered with the PDP, conveyed same to the party and to 

the INEC is now declared by INEC as the winner of an election 

under the NNPP. 

He said despite the naira redesign policy which the government claimed was intended to end the culture of vote-buying, the 2023 general election was among the worse in terms of vote-buying. 

According to him, while the volume of cash being used to bribe voters has reduced, the quantum of other truckloads of essential commodities that was used openly, at polling units, to bribe voters was unprecedented in the history of elections in Nigeria.

He observed that the embarrassing decision of INEC to close down the iReV server might not be unconnected with the very widespread failures of the BVAS across the country. 

He noted that majority of the PUs across rural Nigeria, the bvas machine failed and simply did not work.

Alkali added: “In the entire arrangements for the 2023 general elections, nothing was more comforting to all political parties on the opposition side than the fact that election results will be transmitted electronically, in real-time, from the polling units to the iReV server. 

“And INEC kept hammering, repeatedly, on the fact that there will be no going back on the arrangement to electronically transmit results from the PUs. But the ruling party and all its candidate kept kicking against the arrangement. To our greatest shock, and in kowtowing to the whims of the ruling party, INEC shelved the electronic transmission arrangement and literally closed the iReV server when only about 30 out of over 176,000 PUs results were uploaded. 

“This very action of colluding with the ruling party and returning to manual transmission has completely compromised the 2023 general elections. Election results were intercepted and changed between PUs and Wards Collation centres, between Wards Collation centres and Local government collation centres, and between local government collation centres and state collation centres.”

He, therefore, noted that “to save our democracy and our country, the present election results must not be accepted by Nigerians and by all friends of Nigeria. We are therefore calling on the immediate suspension of the announcement of result and the cancellation of the 2023 presidential election across the country. New election should be conducted as soon as possible.”