He accused INEC of conniving with the government in power every election year to cause confusion in the polity in order to make the electorate lose interest in the election.
The presidential candidate of the African Action Congress (AAC), Omoyele Sowore, on Wednesday said the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) of being incompetent to conduct the 2023 general elections.
Sowore said this at ‘The Roundtable’, a programme organised by PUNCH Newspapers, alleging that the country's electoral body could not be trusted with people’s mandate during the polls because it had not been conducting elections in the past, but selections.
He accused INEC of conniving with the government in power every election year to cause confusion in the polity in order to make the electorate lose interest in the election.
He said, “You know I participated in the 2019 elections and I can say categorically that there was no election in 2019. And this was how they started. I was waiting in my village for the election. And INEC suddenly on the eve of 2019 elections postponed the election by two weeks. You know what happened, some of our colleagues that came from the US to vote, US, Europe, South Africa, they had to leave. They were not small number. I am not saying the number would have made me win the election. But the moment INEC was postponed, people had doubts as to whether the election would hold again and they lost interest.
“In 2015, the election was also postponed for security reasons. Why are they talking about postponing the election when the governor of Borno state is saying that 90% of Borno is not free from Boko-Haram control? If you ask me, that is not true. They were saying that 90% of Borno is free for rigging so that they would bring their big numbers from all these fake places where they claimed that people were voting and there were not even people living in those areas. Most importantly, it shows that INEC cannot be trusted. INEC is an incompetent electoral body. I have said this too many times.
“It doesn’t matter how you look at it. Elections have been organised by INEC, it always has hiccups, even in Osun where they claimed that BVAS which is their magic one worked, we were hearing about over voting, over registration and all those kinds of electoral malpractices that they claimed BVAS had resolved.”
Sowore equally explained how he logged in to INEC’s website for the Osun State election results but the website had no capacity to handle the large traffic of people trying to access it and this made it difficult to get timely result.
“I logged into their website for live results. The website is hogwash. It has no capacity to handle as many connections as the number of people who were trying to access. What are they going to do during the main election when over probably 50million people were trying to access the website from home and abroad. That is the truth. The people of Nigerians should make it clear that are not expecting anything less than free and fair election because we have paid for it already and INEC should not come with any excuse,” he added.
Asked what he would do if he lost the 2023 elections as he did in 2019, the AAC standard bearer said there was no election in 2019.
“You cannot lose what was not held. It’s just like going to the World Cup. There are rules for playing in the World Cup, and the day you want to play the final…only one team shows up, because the other team is held up in the preparation room and then they declare a winner, will you call that a final?” he said.
“I was arrested before I could go to court (to challenge the 2019 election), but I wasn’t interested in going to court because I also understand the judiciary, that they’re all in this together.
“It’s the judiciary that made a person a governor in Imo State that participated in an election and was number four,” Sowore added.
Asked why he was participating in a system he did not believe in, the AAC presidential candidate said it was his right and choice to participate.
“I cannot say because Nigeria is not working and tear my passport. It is my choice to keep it. So, it is my choice to participate,” he said.