Attahiru Jega, a former Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), has urged the electoral umpire to shun politicians who are fighting to frustrate the deployment of the Bimodal Voter Registration System (BVAS) for the 2023 elections just for their selfish interest.
Jega, a guest on Channels Television’s Politics Today on Wednesday, said that as the election draws closer, politicaians get more desperate.
“I think what is most important is the capacity of the election management body to resist that pressure and having recognised that using technology will add more value to the election, they should just remain focused,” he said.
He charges INEC “not to allow the parties to stop them from using the BVAS or the electronic transmission of results since they now have a legal backing”.
There are allegations that politicians who are against BVAS may be heading to the court of law to stop INEC from deploying BVAS in the 2023 elections.
BVAS is stipulated in the Electoral Act of 2022 and it is a technological system which allows for accreditation of voters through biometrics capturing, uploading of results amongst others.
Recall that the opposition political parties in Nigeria under the aegis of the Coalition of United Political Parties (CUPP), has raised the alarm that there are plots to stop the electronic transmission of the 2023 election results and deactivate the BVAS from the server of INEC. The allegation is yet to be confirmed.
Also reacting to the CUPP’s claims, Jega said, “While I am not lending any credibility to what has been alleged, frankly from my own experience, we saw how close to the election, some politician became afraid that using the card reader was going to stop rigging the election using their own methods, so they came out and at a point even started demanding publicly for me to either resign or go on what they called terminal leave so that I didn’t have to supervise the conduct of the 2015 general elections.”
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