A former Director, Voter Education and Publicity, INEC, Oluwole Osaze-Uzzi has waded into the controversy caused by sack of Governor Ademola Adeleke as Governor of Osun state.
Recall that an Osun tribunal on Friday, January 27, nullified the election of Governor Adeleke and further declared Adegboyega Oyetola of the All Progressives Congress as winner of the 2022 governorship election.
Reacting to this during an interview on Channels Television, Uzzi provided clarifications on the discrepancy related to the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS).
He explained that the APC obtained a certified copy of the initial server report before some of the data had been transmitted by the BVAS hardware.
The former INEC director further stated that the verdict was not a unanimous judgement. He said;
“The second [tribunal] member – the honourable justice who dissented from his two colleagues – said, ‘I would rather use the primary source of this information, and the primary source of this data is actually the machine itself.
“It is basically a computer. So, rather than go to the server where it transmitted data, I would use the printout from the machine itself.
“The machines were tendered, so were the reports from the server, and there ought not to have been a discrepancy, but somewhere along the line, not all the data had been transmitted at the time the APC obtained the certified copy of the initial server report.”
Osaze-Uzzi, however, described the judgement as a validation of the role BVAS has played in enhancing the electoral process.
He added;
“It was BVAS that exposed that as it were, and the fact that the BVAS report was relied on. But we have to be careful; which of the BVAS reports was relied on? Was it what was transmitted to the server – to the back-end – or was it the BVAS itself?
“The chairman and the second member relied on the initial report and the initial report of the back-end, duly certified by INEC.
“It was downloaded from the server [after it was] transmitted. But a couple of days later – INEC used the word ‘synchronised’, I’m not too sure I like that word, but – you synchronise it and say, ‘Have all the results been transmitted – has all data been transmitted from the machine, BVAS itself, to the server?’
“The machine is a physical one and then it transmits to a physical one. It now went, checked and said, ‘There’s a problem here.’ The BVAS report now downloaded itself, [we] now brought it out and examined each BVAS machine and now found out that no, some data was not transmitted to the server.”