The President Muhammadu Buhari Campaign Organisation was swift in responding to the EU report on Saturday, June 15, 2019.
Festus Keyamo, the spokesman for the organization, on Saturday, June 15, 2019, queried some aspects of the report and declared the document not definitive enough.
Keyamo who was Buhari’s agent at the collation centre disputed the Mission’s claim that the collation of the election results was not transparent enough.
According to him, “There are aspects of the report that are not definitive enough. For instance, if they say the result collation process is not transparent enough, I expect them to be very clear as to what they expect to happen over and above or beyond what we have in the Electoral Act currently.
“I can see that they expect that result from each unit is made known and published. However, you can see that the Electoral Act allows for the Form EC8A from each of the polling units to be given to agents of the political parties.
“They did agree that those results came from agents of the political parties; they did not see any place where party agents were denied copies of Form EC8As.
“Again, the Electoral Act allows for the Form EC8A to be pasted at each polling unit. Pasting is publication if you didn’t know.
“So this Form EC8A was published in each of the polling units, so I don’t want Nigerians to go away with the impression that those results from each polling unit were not published.
“The only thing that I may agree with their report is that they want it to be centrally published on INEC website.
“I do agree but there is no mechanism to automatically publish it now because there is no provision for automatic electronic transmission of results and this is the crux of this election. “There is no provision for that and I expected them to talk about that a lot in their recommendations.
“They should have dwelt on the crux of our election now which is electronic transmission. They know that that system collapsed in Kenya so we should not be quick to jump and follow the world when we know that technologically we are not ripe for that yet.
“As for us, we knew that the opposition was only banking on that; we knew they were just banking on waiting in Abuja, hacking into a server if it was available, planting a result and declaring a winner.
“But it doesn’t work out that way because there must be state by state collation of results Secondly, and most importantly, the EUROM failed to discuss the report of other observers. These were local observers, regional observers, continental who came to the conclusion that despite these hiccups here and there, the results reflected the wishes of the generality of Nigerians.
“If you are an observer, you must be definitive in your report. There is no need being dodgy about it because we have 120,000 polling units across the country. In all the reports, I don’t think they discussed more than two polling units.”
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