Victor Ezeja
Less than 40 days to Nigeria’s presidential election, the Labour Party has raised the alarm over its inability to upload data of its polling unit agents on the portal of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), due to poor server response, even with the deadline for submission already reached.
Deputy National Campaign Manager of the Obi-Datti Presidential Campaign, Isaac Balami, who appeared on the Arise News Prime Time show on Thursday, lamented that the development has frustrated their effort to meet the deadline and fulfils the requirement by the electoral body.
Balami, who is also a senior special adviser on presidential campaign matters, fundraising and grassroots mobilisation for the Labour Party Campaign Council, stated that they have details of their polling unit agents ready but in the past three days, the INEC server has been very slow.
He further disclosed that INEC had initially fixed 20th January as the deadline for all political parties to conclude the upload of their polling unit agents data but suddenly brought the date forward to 18th January, without informing the Labour Party even when the Commission did not give it early enough code for doing the upload on time.
He said: “We have more than 180,000 polling unit agents, upload is going on, but we have a challenge. The upload was meant to end on the 31st of December but because INEC did not give the Labour Party the code early enough to begin our upload, it was then agreed between Labour Party and INEC to shift the deadline to the 20th of January, 2023 to submit the polling unit agents. Now we were told that INEC has reduced the date from 20th to 18th of January 2023.
“The challenge now is that in the last 48 hours, the INEC server has been very, very slow and is affecting the upload. This is not our fault. We are actually struggling with the uploads as I speak.
“We have the agents ready to be uploaded but it’s very, very slow. We have complained to INEC and INEC has confirmed that the fault is their server.”
He said that what led to the challenge was probably because INEC did not prepare for the pressure that could come to its system in the last minute as many other political parties may also be struggling to meet the deadline.
“We have made every effort to ensure that within the last two to three weeks we have the data of all our polling unit agents uploaded but unfortunately, I think INEC did not prepare for the pressure. We assume that toward the 11th hour, all the parties have been uploading, which is almost about a million data uploaded at same time, which has affected by the server,” Balami stated in an interview with Arise News anchor, Charles Aniagolu on Thursday.
Victor Ezeja is a passionate journalist with six years of experience writing on economy, politics and energy. He holds a Masters degree in Mass Communication.
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