I have always wondered how Abubakar Atiku came to believe that he won an election that was monitored from polling booth to polling booth in Nigeria, by foreign observers, newspaper reporters, online news media, bloggers and all manner of busybodies in Nigeria, and he lost by 3.9 million votes!
I think I now have a few ideas as to why he thinks he could fool us with that funny story or why maybe he himself may believe the story. Some people took money from him and told him that they could hack the INEC server and put in figures for him. Simple.
Atiku’s main argument in his election petition is that INEC’s server showed that he won the election by 1.6million votes. He also gave the details of the purported results from the server.
He claims that card readers were used to send the results electronically to the INEC server! Everyone saw just how ridiculous the figures were. Fortunately for truth, the lawyers are not good at maths.
So his lawyers didn’t see from the figures that the total votes of President Buhari and Atiku added up exactly to the total number of accredited voters! Meaning that there were zero votes for all other candidates, zero cancelled or invalid votes in all of the polling booths all over Nigeria! This should ordinarily be enough to throw out the petition without more and show Atiku that he has been caught out in his scam or he has been scammed.
But the PDP and Atiku are accustomed to 419 and propaganda. They now say that they will call Microsoft and Oracle ( how about Google and Huawei?) to show that the INEC server actually made him the winner of the election! How can this make any sense?
Firstly, we were all at our polling units on Election Day. Card readers were used to verify our voters cards. Then we voted. Votes were counted manually (by hand in our presence ) and entered into a form by the INEC officials. The forms were then signed by party agents. This is the authentic result.
Most observers and online reports posted these results. I have not heard that anyone who was at his polling booth on Election Day saw any INEC official inputting results on the card readers andposting them electronically to a server!
What Atiku and his PDP fellow travelers want to sell to us is that after the votes were counted and declared, they were then entered into the card readers and posted electronically on to the INEC server!
Question is: who did the postings? Did the party agents see what was being posted by the INEC officials? If in fact the INEC officials secretly posted the results, how do we know if they were the same results properly counted at the polling booths? Or was the posting done after collation at the local government and State collation centres? If so, who saw this happen? Did the party agents see what was being posted? Every thing done by INEC at the State and National Collation centres were transparent, in full view of cameras and live television. So when and why were these postings done secretly?
The truth of the matter is clear for all to see. There were no electronic posting of results from polling booths or collation centres.
What happened could be either of the following: Atiku was tricked to believe that there was an INEC server that could be accessed or hacked to post results favorable to him. He must have paid a lot for it. The fake results were posted.
As of Monday when Atiku was seeing the authentic results as they were brought forward by Returning Officers, Professors from different Universities announcing, Atiku started to complain that the results he had were different from those being announced!
Or perhaps, Atiku is trying to save face after a bruising defeat. He wants to cast as much doubt as possible by inventing a tale, a ridiculous tale that there is an INEC server that only he has access to and not surprisingly it contains information that he won the elections!
The only question to ask him is how did you access the server? If you have exclusive access to it, then the integrity of the server is in doubt. It means you could change figures as you wish! All told this is just too silly . Dear Alhaji Abubakar Atiku, it is time to go home. Cameroun?
*Dr. Burba Musa Ahmed wrote in from Maiduguri and can be reached via email: [email protected]
