Protesters yesterday stormed the National Collation Centre (NCC) for the 2023 general elections at International Conference Centre (ICC), calling for suspension of the ongoing presidential election results announced by Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), amid the tension in the country.
They also called for the resignation of the Chairman of the Independent Electoral Commission (INEC), Mahmood Yakubu, over his failure to upload election results on INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV).
The protesters carried placards with inscriptions such as: “#INEC Keep Your Promise; #Bring Back IRev; No IReV no collation; “Nigeria Is Not For Sale; We Must Fight For Justice”; “Our Vote Must Count”; “We stand for justice”; “We fight for a new Nigeria ”.
The group leader, Obu Elekwa, lamented over the failure of INEC to upload the election result electronically, urging Yakubu to fulfill his pledge of a free, transparent election.
She said: “We are ready for them, they know what that means when they have to see the nakedness of women who are not their wives, mothers or sisters, it’s an abomination.
“And we’re going to be doing it on the land of Nigeria. We won’t watch them cause another war. We won’t give them the opportunity to slap our children again.”
Meanwhile, the Director-general of National Orientation Agency (NOA), Dr. Garba Abari, has appealed to Nigerians to remain calm and avoid acts or utterances capable of overheating the polity.
Abari made the appeal in a special statement, urging Nigerians to conduct themselves with decorum especially regarding the on-going collation of results. He called on Nigerians to be patient and allow for the completion of the result collation process, bearing in mind that there are available legal means for redress of electoral grievances.
He said: “As a people, we have invested so much in the 2023 General Elections, both as a nation and as individual citizens, to let anything truncate the process at any point.
I call on political, religious and traditional leaders and indeed all leaders of thought, to not only exercise caution in their utterances at this time, but also to please use their influence to promote peace, restraint and recourse to legal means alone at this critical moment of our national experience.”
