The presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Bola Tinubu has expressed no confidence in the decision of the National Electoral Commission to deploy the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) and the INEC Results Viewing Portal (IReV) for the 2023 election.
“INEC is still yet to assure us during this election that electronic transmission, the technology being used for the accreditation and the total votes counts is reliable, dependable and assuring in our democratic process before we introduce a complicated element of…ballot,” Mr Tinubu stated this on Monday, at Chatham House in London as part of a strategy to expound on his plans for security, economy and foreign policy in the United Kingdom.
Tinubu’s fresh opposition to the voting technology reinforced the position of the ruling party, which had earlier claimed that Nigeria was not yet ripe for the use of such technology in the 2023 poll.
Speaking further before a diverse audience at the frontline UK think-tank, Mr Tinubu said he’s one of the politicians in Nigeria now losing confidence in the nation’s voting system with the introduction of the new technology ahead of the polls.
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“We are still losing confidence in our democratic and voting system,” he said.
INEC had insisted that there was no going back on the deployment of the technology for the 2023 election exercise.
Mahmud Yakubu, the chairman of the electoral body had said the introduction of BVAS and IRev, a technology to upload election results in real-time, was to ensure a free, fair and credible election.
While there were alleged moves recently by some political actors in the country to prevail on the electoral umpire to drop the use of BVAS and return to the use of incident forms in the accreditation of voters in the next year’s poll, more Nigerians have embraced the technology and warned that discarding it could spell doom for the entire exercise.
Mr Tinubu’s appearance comes less than three months before the presidential and National Assembly election scheduled for February 25, 2023. The governorship and state elections would hold two weeks later on March 11.
The presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) Bola Tinubu has promised to recruit more teachers and also give student loans as part of efforts to develop the education sector and also build the youth capacity.
Tinubu made the promise at the British Royal Institute in London.
“Youths are the greatest asset of tomorrow,” Tinubu said in Chatham House while fielding questions from participants at the event, adding that they will be part of his “all-inclusive” government, pointing to the Lagos State Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu.
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“The education system is to change. We would overhaul it and tinker with some areas with the philosophy that no one would be left behind. There will be student loans for all. We are going to reform the Almajiri system, We are equally going to build more schools, recruit more teachers and train them,” the former Lagos State governor said.
To further help young people, he said if elected, his government would equally introduce technology hubs where youths can acquire digital skills to better develop their leadership skills.
“Youths can even develop technological languages on their own and make a better 21st-century approach to governance in Nigeria,” he said.
Monday’s event focused on economic and foreign policies as well as national security among others.
Earlier, the former Lagos State governor was spotted in London with some chieftains of the party ahead of the event. Some of them include the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Femi Gbajabiamila; Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El-Rufai and his Jigawa State counterparty, Abubakar Badaru; former Ekiti State Governor, Kayode Fayemi amongst others.
Tinubu is in the 2023 presidential race alongside frontline candidates including Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) and Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
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