Festus Okoye, the INEC National Commissioner, gave the Nigerian people assurance that the Result Viewing Portal (IReV) will be operational on March 18 when voting takes place.
Chidi Nwafor, the Independent National Electoral Commission’s (INEC) director responsible for information and communication technology (ICT), was moved a few months prior to the general elections of 2023, and INEC has provided an explanation for the move.
There have been various theories as to what may have gone wrong when INEC failed to transfer the real-time results of the February 25 presidential election from the polling locations to its webpage. Several have claimed that the commission was missing Nwafor’s competence.
Festus Okoye, the INEC National Commissioner, emphasised that the commission is structured so that no department revolves around a certain person while speaking on Channels Television’s Sunday Politics.
The commission’s current leaders aspire to create a professional organisation that is not centred on a single person. The person (Nwafor) described is a very close friend of mine; he serves as a director in the commission, and any director may be moved somewhere or transfer to another position, such as administrative secretary, Okoye stated.
The commission was little concerned about whether we would have new resident electoral commissioners at the time we revised the list of administrative secretaries, and elections were being planned.
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“The commission thus determined in its wisdom that we are going to dispatch our finest personnel to the several states as administrative secretaries to go and prepare the states for the purposes of election, and that is precisely what the commission did.
We have a department in charge of information and communication technology, and the Chidi I know attempted to create a department that can stand on its own whether he is there or not, and that is the same case with every department, he said.
Okoye said “technical issues” that, according to him, had been fixed in advance of the March 18 gubernatorial and state assembly elections, were the cause of INEC’s failure to transfer polling unit results directly to its portal in real time as it had promised before the polls.
The commission’s Result Viewing Site (IReV), he told Nigerians, will be operational on March 18 when voting takes place.
