Investogist - LP won Obio-Akpor LGA Rivers State not APC as announced

The debate over Nigeria’s presidential election of February 25th, 2023, has continued 2 weeks after the election and 12 days after the declaration of Bola Tinubu, the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) as the President-Elect.

By announcing and issuing certificate of return to the President-Elect, the chairman of the electoral umpire, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Prof. Mahmood Yakubu reneged on his promises to look into the complains of political parties before announcing and declaring a winner.

Also read; We will march to INEC offices nationwide if need be – Labour Party

He also reneged on the promises he made about the utilization of the INEC Result Viewing Portal (IReV). As at the time of the announcement of a winner, less than 50% of the results had been uploaded on the portal, and at the time of this report, 94% of Polling Unit (PU) results has been uploaded.

The idea of the IReV as was marketed by INEC and understood by many Nigerians was that at the end of the elections and announcement of the result at the PU, a copy of the result will be scanned with the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) machine and uploaded to the IReV, where everyone can see it. At INEC’s collation centers, the hard copy of the PU result must correspond with the one uploaded to IReV, the measure as INEC told Nigerians will eliminate any manipulation of results between the PU and collation centers.

The upload of the presidential elections results didn’t start until late in the night on 25th February, INEC later stated it had challenges with IReV on that day.

The delays, eventual update, and the reasons given by INEC are secondary, what is primary now is that the results announced by INEC has to correspond with the results being uploaded on its IReV portal.

An investigation and tabulation of the IReV results started by Investogist analysts and other Nigerians that have devoted their time to this exercise has shown a discrepancy between the result announced by INEC for Obio-Akpor Local Government Area of Rivers State and that found on the IReV.

The manner in which most of the national media reported the declaration of the Rivers State results draws the curiosity of any reader, Channels TV reported;

Earlier, there was a strong battle for who would take Rivers State, with the Labour Party and All Progressives Congress going neck and neck.

At the time, results from 21 local government areas had been collated and they indicated Obi was in a slight lead, however, all that changed when the results for the final two LGAs came in.

Prior to the final collation, the APC candidate had polled 148,979 votes, while the LP candidate polled 169,414 votes. But when results from Wike’s LGA of Obio-Akpor came in, the figures changed drastically.

The final result saw Tinubu polling 231,593 votes while Obi got 175,555 votes.

Investogist reports that according to the results uploaded on INEC’s IReV portal, the President-Elect did not win Obio-Akpor LGA, and that the figures announced by INEC diverged tremendously from what is on the portal.

Without discarding most of the PU results that were mutilated in an effort to rewrite the results and seemingly assign votes to APC in wards such as Rumueme (7A), the Labour Party still won this local government. These changes of numbers on the result forms and those without INEC stamp or signatures, on their own are disputable.

Below is a comparison of the two results, with the one announced by INEC in brackets, note that several PU results are either not uploaded at the time of this report, not readable, incorrect, a letter or image was uploaded in its place.

Obio-Akpor (LGA: 15) Rivers State