When the APC discovered that Atiku had the authentic votes of the 2019 presidential election, retrieved from the INEC back server, the party went into panic mode. Their first reaction was to demand that Atiku be prosecuted for hacking into the INEC computer. But this position was self-defeating. If indeed Atiku was guilty of this infraction, that would, in effect, authenticate the figures he released.
APC spokesman, Festus Keyamo, then insisted Atiku must have posted fake results in the INEC server. To lend weight to this far-fetched line of defense, he petitioned the Inspector General of Police and the Director General of the Department of State Services (DSS) to prosecute Atiku for this alleged illegality.
But INEC itself threw a spanner into the works by insisting that Atiku’s figures are fabricated and not from its website. This risposte was quickly debunked. Atiku’s lawyers demonstrated conclusively that the INEC back server from which their figures were obtained has a footprint unique to INEC.
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They even published its serial numbers. According to them, the results were first transmitted to INEC’s presidential Results Server 1, and thereafter aggregated in INEC_PRES_RSLT_SRV2019, whose unique Macintosh address is 94-57-A5-DC-64-B9, with Microsoft Product ID 00252-7000000000-AA535.
They also promise to bring the manufacturers of the INEC computer to testify that the server from which their results were tabulated bear the INEC copyright and can only come from INEC. In short, INEC is the only organization in the world with those serial numbers on its back server.
Checkmate
At every juncture, Atiku’s lawyers checkmated INEC. INEC says it only engaged in manual collation of results and did not transmit any results electronically. However, Atiku has several bona fide INEC officials willing to testify that INEC did, indeed, engage in electronic collation.
Smart Card Readers, deployed by INEC, were employed not only for voter accreditation, but also for electronic transmission of the results from the polling units directly to the INEC server. An official video presentation used to educate Nigerians on the conduct of the 2019 elections indicated INEC’s intention to deploy Smart Card Readers for the authentication of the voter accreditation and for the transmission of results.
INEC’s position that it also could not have engaged in electronic collation of results because the Electoral Act intended to validate the process was not signed into law by the president is also hogwash. INEC does not need the president’s permission, or any legislative act for that matter, in order to engage in electronic collation of election results.
Section 160 of the 1999 Nigerian Constitution states categorically that: “any of the bodies may with the approval of the president, by rules or otherwise regulate its own procedure or confer powers and impose duties on any officer or authority for the purpose of discharging its function; provided that in the case of the Independent National Electoral Commission, its powers to make its own rules or otherwise regulate its own procedure shall not be subject to the approval or control of the president”.
Going by this, INEC required and obtained billions of naira from the government for the express purpose of transmitting results electronically. Before the election, INEC chairman, Mahmood Yakubu, said that: “(INEC) will deploy a new platform for electronic collation and transmission of results.” During the election itself, INEC had two officers at every ward collation center, one for the manual recording of the votes and the other for the electronic transmission of the results.
Therefore, INEC cannot be believed if it now insists it did not transmit the election results electronically. The evidence is overwhelming that the results of the election were transmitted electronically to the INEC server, giving the lie to INEC’s denials and confirming that the Commission subsequently changed the votes manually in favour of Buhari after the fact.
It is not surprising therefore that two months after the courts directed INEC to furnish Atiku and the PDP all the documents and materials used in the 2019 presidential election, INEC has yet to do so, despite being served with the order and after several follow-ups. Clearly, INEC has something to hide.
Knock-out punch
In spite of the heated debate generated by the discrepancy in the figures posted in INEC’s server and those it declared to the public, Atiku’s most damning case was provided by the simple claim that Buhari gave false information about his school certificate in the Form CF001 that he submitted to INEC. He also alleges that Buhari does not possess the requisite secondary school certificate he laid claim to in the form.
This is where Atiku clearly produces an outright knock-out punch against Buhari. Buhari gave in 2019 the same lame excuse he gave in 2015 that his academic qualification documents are currently with the Secretary of the Military Board. This means even in the intervening four years, Buhari has still has not been able to retrieve them.
This is not surprising because the military deposed in 2015 that it did not have Buhari’s educational credentials. Instead, the army released the following statement which quickly gave the lie to Buhari’s affidavit:
“It is a practice in the Nigerian Army that before candidates are shortlisted for commissioning into the officers’ cadre of the Service; the Selection Board verifies the original copies of credentials that are presented. However, there is no available record to show that this process was followed in the 1960s. Neither the original copy, Certified True Copy (CTC); nor statement of result of Major General M Buhari’s WASC result, is in his personal file.”
Atiku also claims the Middle School Katsina and Katsina Provincial Secondary School which Buhari claimed to have attended in his CV between 1953-1956 and 1956-1961 respectively were actually non-existent at the material time he indicated. In effect, President Buhari committed perjury on his INEC form.
