As the controversy surrounding the demand by the Independent Nation Electoral Commission on the appellate court to differ the request of the presidential candidate of the Peoples’ Democratic Party, Atiku Abubakar, and his Labour Party counterpart, Peter Obi to inspect the Bimodal Voters Accreditation System, BVAS, to enable them reconfigure the machines ahead of the March 11, governorship election rages, an analyst, Mr. Lanre Oloyede has advised the court to approve the supervision of INEC’s reconfiguration of BVAS by political parties.

Mr. Oloyede gave the advice while commenting on the development on ATN politics. Mr. Lanre said anything short of supervision of transfer of information will leave room for doubt. He however, noted that postponement of the March 11, will restore confidence in the process.

He said, “The best bet is for the court to allow representatives of political parties to be party of the process. If political parties can produce IT expert who can monitor INEC while they are transferring this information to the backend server in order to ascertain that it is the correcting thing that is being transferred to the backend server, I think that will also help to serve a lot.”

Mr. Oloyede noted that INEC’s antecedents have created room for suspicion of its actions.

“It will not be out of place to postpone the election but that wouldn’t come without cost – cost on the part of INEC and Cost on the part of the political parties because INEC has spent so much money to prepare for this elections. They have printed materials.

“Materials have been dated March 11, and those materials will now have to be reprinted. A lot of the parties have spent monies to mobilized their party agents. They have spent monies to mobilize people, they will now have to that all over again if that election is postponed,” he said.

He noted that postponement will be at a financial and logistical cost to both the political parties and INEC, this however, is not costlier then the integrity of the process.

According Mr. Oloyede, “There will be a lot of integrity question on the part of INEC. Recall that in 2019 presidential election, when INEC had hinted transmitting result of the election into its backend server that generated a lot of controversy whereby INEC denied transmitting any result on its backend server.

“Fast-forward to 2023, INEC promised Nigerians that results of the presidential and national assembly election will be transmitted to the IReV portal in real-time at the polling unis and that did not happen and this has increased the integrity question on INEC. So, the political parties will doubt INEC as to whether they will correctly and accurately transfer those information from the BVAS to their backend server as they have said.”

The Court of Appeal is espected to rule on whether or not INEC should proceed with the reconfiguration of its BVAS machine ahead of the March 11 state elections or insist that Obi and Atiku inspect the devises before any election. Obi and Atiku had obtained and ex perte order mandating INEC to allow them inspect the device and restraining the Commission from tempering with them.