Under oath, Lawrence Bayode, the INEC deputy director in charge of technology, said that on election day, cloud servers in charge of processing the transmission of presidential election results collapsed.
However, Mr. Bayode stated that the failure was not specifically related to results manipulation. He made no mention of how, despite the opposition’s ongoing protests, he was certain that the problem had no bearing on the outcome of the poll.
When Mr. Bayode went before the presidential election petitions tribunal in Abuja on Monday, he made the admission.
He was asked to testify by INEC legal counsel A.B. Mahmoud, a prominent attorney who pledged to limit his testimony to providing the tribunal with verified electoral records.
Additionally, Mr. Bayode informed the court that INEC had stated three days prior to the election that results would not be made available electronically, contradicting the widely known position of the electoral office that results would be made available electronically in accordance with the most recent changes to the electoral law.
Even yet, petitioner Atiku Abubakar said that Mr. Bayode’s admission of a server error was required proof that INEC miscommunicated election results.
Based in Abuja, Mr. Bayode claimed to have worked for INEC for 24 years.
He made his appearance one week after Mr. Abubakar, the leader of the major opposition PDP, finished presenting his case to the tribunal. Peter Obi of the Labour Party is another person contesting the announcement of President Bola Tinubu as the victor of the election on February 25.
Messrs. Abubakar and Obi have made allegations ranging from electoral fraud to Mr. Tinubu’s criminal history as a cocaine trafficker in an effort to prevent him from running for office.