Fresh questions have emerged over the conduct of the 2023 presidential election in Rivers State following renewed scrutiny of result sheets and recent comments by former Rivers State Governor and current Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Nyesom Wike.
The controversy centres on claims that some polling-unit result sheets from Rivers were altered or contained apparent discrepancies, while supporters of Labour Party candidate Peter Obi continue to argue that the official result did not reflect the voting pattern in parts of the state.
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) declared Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress the winner of the presidential election in Rivers State with 231,591 votes, ahead of Obi of the Labour Party, who was credited with 175,071 votes. Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party scored 88,468 votes.
The Rivers result became particularly controversial because Obi was ahead of Tinubu after results from 21 of the state's 23 local government areas had been collated.
Contemporary reporting showed that Obi had 169,414 votes against Tinubu's 148,979 at that stage. The final outcome changed dramatically after the results from Obio/Akpor and another local government were added.
Obio/Akpor, which was then Wike's local government area, became particularly significant. INEC's declared figures credited Tinubu with 80,239 votes in the area and Obi with 3,829.
However, a later review by Premium Times of results uploaded to INEC's Results Viewing Portal found substantial discrepancies between the announced figures and the figures appearing on result sheets from many polling units in Obio/Akpor.
The newspaper said its tally of 1,116 out of 1,211 polling units showed Obi with 73,311 votes and Tinubu with 17,158 votes. It also reported apparent alterations and mutilations on some result sheets.
The review did not cover every polling unit, with some results reportedly missing, illegible or improperly uploaded. It therefore does not by itself constitute a judicial determination of the overall state result.
The controversy has been reignited by Wike's recent comments on the 2023 election. During a TVC interview, Wike challenged Obi's supporters to produce an official result sheet showing that the Labour Party candidate won Rivers State.
“Let them produce that result sheet that says Obi won,” Wike said, arguing that INEC's declared result was what should be recognised.
Wike also questioned why Obi's supporters did not establish their claim during the legal challenge to the 2023 presidential election.
The former governor has subsequently rejected accusations that he rigged the election for Tinubu.
According to Wike, the political strategy of the G5 governors was to prevent Atiku Abubakar, the PDP presidential candidate, from securing enough votes in the South-South region. He said the strategy included encouraging support for Obi in some areas in order to reduce Atiku's advantage.
Wike has therefore characterised his role as political strategy rather than alteration of election results.
The controversy also has a legal dimension. In September 2023, the Presidential Election Petition Court rejected aspects of Obi's challenge concerning alleged irregularities in Rivers and other states, holding that the petitioners had not sufficiently established some of the allegations.
The tribunal said allegations concerning incorrect or fictitious votes in Rivers and Benue had to be supported with evidence, including the production of competing sets of results where necessary.
The tribunal's ruling did not mean that every result sheet in Rivers was necessarily free from discrepancies; rather, the petitioners were required to prove the alleged non-compliance and demonstrate that it substantially affected the election outcome.
INEC's own 2023 election report explains that polling-unit presidential results were supposed to be scanned and uploaded to the IReV platform for public viewing.
The commission acknowledged that the presidential-result upload system experienced technical problems on election day. It said the problem resulted from how the system had been configured and that a software “hotfix” was deployed, after which uploads resumed.
The existence of an apparently altered or inconsistent result sheet therefore raises questions about the result-management process, but determining whether a particular sheet should have been rejected requires examination of the original polling-unit result, the accreditation and voting figures, the collation records and the applicable electoral procedures.
The Rivers 2023 presidential result remains politically significant because Wike openly supported Tinubu despite being a PDP governor at the time, while Obi emerged as the leading candidate in several parts of the South-South.
The latest dispute is consequently no longer limited to the numerical result. It has also become part of the wider political argument over whether the 2023 election accurately reflected voters' choices and whether electoral institutions adequately addressed disputed result sheets.
For now, the officially declared result remains that Tinubu won Rivers State. At the same time, documented discrepancies identified in some uploaded result sheets provide a factual basis for continued scrutiny of aspects of the state's result-management process.
Wike's denial of personally rigging the election and his explanation of the G5 strategy also remain part of the record. The available evidence does not establish, on its own, the claim that he personally altered result sheets or that his alleged actions amounted to a criminal offence.
Comments
Post a Comment