A company led by the National Leader of the All Progressives
Congress (APC), Ahmed Bola Tinubu, may have deployed the perfect
election-rigging mechanism in the 2015 election, a confidential review
obtained by SaharaReporters shows.
And it may all have been accomplished with the Independent National
Electoral Commission (INEC) not knowing its own technology was being
used against it.
It began in 2012 when a company, Act Technologies Limited, was put
into play after it had been taken from its original owners by Tinubu and
Retired Col. Sani Bello, two of Africa’s wealthiest men. ACT went into
partnership with INEC to provide voter registration and accreditation,
as well as election-management technology, to Nigeria’s electoral body.
“This company eventually flushed out the original recipient of
the voter management system contract from INEC and provided a
compromised technology which had a gaping back door framework for
manipulating voter registration, PVC card issue and the voting process,” the report said.
The contract to provide INEC with the election technology was
originally to have been awarded to Zinox Technologies Ltd, but INEC
frustrated Zinoxand ensured it was awarded to ACT, which was then used
to perpetrate APC’s scheme known as “Preferred Voter Arrangement.”
“Despite winning the INEC contract, the company had no records of having filed an annual report as of May 2015,” the report said. “Disgruntled
individuals within the company have revealed that approximately 80% of
the company’s earnings from IMEC were siphoned off, with the company
being left with 20% to execute the project.”
The report is replete with tales of money-laundering and
manipulation, fake companies and addresses, and of powerful people and
their families playing games with funds and companies. Many of the
companies remain unknown to the Corporate Affairs Commission.
Among its stunning revelations, the bulk of the funds paid by INEC
for the card reader project were paid out without delay to companies
that were completely unrelated to the project. “In fact, a majority of the money was paid out to a Maigidana Bureau de Change, a company with a fake address.”
Of greater importance, however, the report said there was strong
evidence that key figures in APC had control of ACT Technologies during
the period in which card readers and PVC cards were being produced, and
had started paying out money through ACT Technologies to the companies
producing the card readers and handling the Biometrics security one year
before INEC paid any money to ACT.
According to the report, “There is a very high probability that
the Card reader technology and accompanying biometric PVC card
technology was severely compromised.”
It observed that a pattern of payments in May and July 2012 to
Shenzhen Emporium by Capital Management Limited, a company suspected to
be linked to Tinubu, and by a friend of APC Niger State governor-elect
Alhaji Sani Abubakar Bello, took place one year a year before INEC paid
any money for the project. “So it is safe to assume that both of
these individuals or the party they represent made these payments in
order to have their own private access to a large number of card
readers. These card readers would have been an exact replica of the
ones given to INEC.”
Examining the pattern of those events, the report said that there
is evidence to suggest that not only did elements within APC have an
exact replica of INEC’s accreditation infrastructure, but that they had
it well in advance of INEC.
“In essence, these individuals gave INEC a system that they already had.”
The report noted that INEC was given a system it could access only
via its handheld terminals, one it was told it had sole custody of.
“They couldn’t have known that prior to the system being
delivered, thousands of other terminals had already been produced for
individuals linked to a political party. Essentially, a secret back
door had been created accreditation system. And while INEC was doing
the voter registration, the individuals with back door access injected
their own data into the INEC database.”
It said all that was then needed was the port address that INEC
used in communicating with the database, which was not difficult to
obtain since the electoral body gave it to their field staff to program
the card readers.
“With access to the port and to the exact replica of both the
card readers and the Biometric security template, parties loyal to the
APC injected data seamlessly and near flawlessly into the database
without anyone being alerted. With inflated accreditation numbers in
designated polling units/regions, they knew exactly which polling units
to rig and go unnoticed.”
The report said the only weakness in the plan concerns whether INEC
kept time logs of when its staff uploaded to the database, otherwise it
would be very difficult to prove definitively that it was tampered
with.
It concluded that in 2015, the electronic accreditation process was clearly tampered with.
The report then offered this dire warning, for a nation facing national elections starting this Saturday: “If
the card reader technology, as it currently exists, gets used in future
elections, the individuals who have this technology have the capability
to inflate accredited voter numbers and dictate which electoral
candidate win which election.”
Tinubu, who has bragged in recent days that he is richer than Osun
State and that he is single-handedly bankrolling Buhari’s re-election
effort. He has promised the president three million votes in Lagos.
Last week, The Guardian (United Kingdom) faulted Nigeria’s voter
registration patterns, noting that the number of new voters registered
since January 2018 has increased by an identical percentage in each of
thestates, leaving the forthcoming polls open to rigging.
The newspaper described the correlation as a "statistical
impossibility," saying it does not reflect Nigeria's demographic
changes.
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Source: SaharaReporters
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