Former National Commissioner of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Mustapha Lecky, has said those in the Information Communication Technology (ICT) unit of INEC lack the competence to tackle system hacking.
Gatekeepers News reports that Lecky, who stated that INEC was not resilient enough to tackle technological disruption in their system, said that INEC over-promised by saying that it will transmit election results in real time.
He added that the electoral umpire should have stuck with the manual process since it is not yet matured technologically.
Lecky said on Channels Television’s Politics Today on Tuesday, “They tried those things in the US (United States), you saw what happened, they were hacking it. So, how many people do you have in the INEC? I worked in INEC, I know the ICT guys, good guys, good ladies that work there, they are not as resilient to be able to rise up to the challenge if their system is being hacked.
“The staff there don’t have that kind of competence to be able to respond to any manner of disruption technologically. Just (a) few guys that are there, you talk about advanced countries like the US that were struggling and then you are talking about Nigeria, how are they going to rise to it?
“So, the issue of over-promising damaged the reputation of INEC and that should not have happened.”
The former INEC commissioner insisted that INEC should not have promised what it was not capable of delivering considering the uncertainties surrounding the Nigerian political situation.
Prior to the 2023 general elections, INEC had promised to transmit results electronically from the polling units to enhance the transparency of the electoral process.
While the Commission successfully transmitted other results, those of the presidential election of February 25, 2023 were not transmitted in real time, with many accusing the electoral body of compromise.
Although INEC had since debunked the allegation of compromise, it stated that a technical glitch was responsible for the non-transmission of the presidential election results from the polling units to its Result Viewing Portal (IReV).
