The INEC Chairman Prof Yakubu Mahmood in a collaborative effort with members of Tinubu’s camp and some elements in the presidency did a hatchet job on the presidential elections.
On 16th October 2022, Nigerians were met with the news of the redeployment of some INEC’s members of staff, according to them, it was a reshuffle aimed at ensuring the efficiency and transparency of the forthcoming elections, but little did Nigerians know that this was a move in a series of moves aimed at manipulating the outcome of the presidential elections, a smokescreen to mask the ulterior motive they had long hatched.
Amongst the people redeployed was Engr Chidi Nwafor, the Director of ICT of INEC since 2013, a position he oversaw and brought massive transformation to, as acclaimed by observers locally and internationally. On the surface, the redeployment of the staff didn’t warrant any suspicion since it appeared to be a routine activity, but on a closer look, one could see a pattern that didn’t really make sense, thus Reportera News Nigeria decided to find out what was amiss and bring the true situation to the fore. Our focus straight away was the Director of ICT who was given a new position as Administrative Secretary of the organization in Enugu, this was one of the most senior staff of the organization and was often regarded as the ‘number 2’ man owing to the fact that he controls the most integral and sensitive office in the organization; the department which not only receives, stores, and processes data of all voters across the country, but oversees the electioneering since the process had been made semi-automated based on the introduction of some relatively advanced technology to make elections more transparent, our interest in this matter was based on this observation because a redeployment of a director to administrative secretary was technically a ‘demotion’ since the latter was a lesser position in the civil service cadres ranking, more worrisome is that Engr Nwafor had not only occupied this position for 10 years, but was the brain behind the Card Reader which was first used in 2015, and BVAs which was going to be used for the presidential election for the first time having used it prior in off-season elections for some state guber elections. It therefore begged the questions:
“Why fix something that isn’t broken?”
“Why change the person who designed a system and was in the best position to administer it?”
Engr Chidi Nwafor is an electronic engineer, he obtained his Bachelor’s Degree in electronic engineering from the University of Nigeria (UNN), he went on to secure a masters in computer engineering and post graduate working experience in Japan, a country regarded as a frontrunner in ICT, suffice it to say that Mr Nwafor knew his onions, he was well grounded in his profession and thus when INEC needed a capable hand to upgrade the electioneering process, they came calling for the Enugu born Anambra indigene to co-captain the ship, it was in this position that he served until his services were abruptly terminated when it was discovered that he wouldn’t ‘play ball’. It is no news that INEC at the behest of the presidency had been scheming to rig the presidential elections in favour of APC who had grown really unpopular among Nigerians due to its mismanagement of the economy and gross underperformance in almost every other sector of the country, they foresaw a loss at the polls hence decided to rig it even before the first ballot, and the only way to achieve this was taking control the voter data, and who controlled this data? you guessed right, the Director of ICT, and what do you do when the person who occupies the position isn’t willing to co-operate? You remove and replace them with who will. This was the exact scenario that panned out at INEC headquarters, our inside sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity have reiterated that this is the reason why Mr Nwafor was moved to Enugu and assigned a new role not even as a state commissioner of the organization which at least wields some power and was on the same level as his directorate position but as an ‘ordinary’ Administrative Secretary, they also revealed that this was done as part of a series of punitive measures for his refusal to be part of the rigging scheme, thus technically demoting him from occupying a position for directorate level staff to that of a deputy director. This scheme was masked by ‘reshuffling’ members of staff, other persons were reassigned to new roles so as not to delineate it as a targeted plot, 384 other members of staff were also affected, but Nwafor’s was the one that was questionable to say the least, to make matters worse, he was replaced by a person who had no prior knowledge on ICT affairs, Mr Paul Omokere who until then was the Director of Planning & Monitoring of INEC. INEC would later go on to commit the biggest electoral fraud in the history of Nigeria, failing to adhere to its own guidelines of uploading results in REAL-TIME to it’s IRev portal, a very important part of the process controlled by the ICT department, subsequently declaring a winner in very controversial circumstances by 4:05am whilst most Nigerians slept, instead of temporarily halting the collation of results until they were completely uploaded unto the IRev portal as the guidelines clearly stated.
Source: Reportera
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