A report by the BBC on Nigeria’s presidential election has disclosed how the Independent National Electoral Commission appointed a fake lecturer to announce the presidential election results in Rivers.
The report detailed how the Rivers state presidential election results were altered to favour the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress, Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
This is as it disclosed that the election official in Oyigbo local government area of the state, Dr Dickson Ariaga, lied about being a staff of the Federal College of Education in Omoku.
However, Deputy Provost of the institution, Moses Ekpa told the BBC: “From our records, both from our payroll and from our human resources, there is no such a name in our system and we don’t know such a person.”
When probed on the identity of Dr Ariaga, Inec’s regional spokesman in Port Harcourt Johnson Sinikiem told BBC that due to a “gross shortage of time and personnel” they had needed to take on some people without verifying their identity documents.
Referring to Dr Ariaga, he said: “If he had presented himself as a lecturer from [the college in Omoku] and it’s otherwise, then he is dishonest.”
The presidential election result in Rivers has been disputed by the opposition parties with various findings pointing to the fact that the uploaded results on INEC’s Irev portal are different from the announced result.
The local governments where this discrepancies are evident are, Oyigbo, where Tinubu’s votes were increased in six folds and Obi’s halved and Obio/Akpor local government.
