The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has explained why its Director of Information Communication Technology (ICT), Chidi Nwafor, was transferred a few months before the 2023 general elections.
There’s been controversies over what caused the non-upload of presidential election results in real time, with many saying that the commission missed the expertise of Nwafor.
Reacting to this during an interview on Channels Television, INEC National Commissioner Festus Okoye stated that the commission is built in a way that no department is wrapped around an individual.
He said;
“The present leadership of the commission wants to build a professional organisation that is not wrapped around one individual. The individual (Nwafor) mentioned is a very good friend of mine; he is a director in the commission and any director can be posted out or to go and become an administrative secretary.
“Now the time we readjusted list of administrative secretaries was the time the commission was slightly panicky on whether we were going to have new resident electoral commissioners and we were preparing for elections.
“So, the commission decided in its wisdom that we are going to post our best hands to the various states as administrative secretaries to go and prepare the states for the purposes of election and that was exactly what the commission did.
“We have a department in charge of ICT and the Chidi I know tried to build a department that can stand on its own whether he is there on not and that is the same thing with every department.”
Okoye also blamed INEC’s inability to transmit polling units results directly to its portal in real time as it promised before the elections to “technical glitches” which he said have been rectified ahead of the March 18 governorship and state assembly elections.
He assured Nigerians that the commission’s Result Viewing Portal (IReV) will be functional during the March 18 elections.