Atedo Peterside, banker and founder of ANAP foundation says Nigeria has become the object of laughter and mockery since evidence began to emerge of the massive bungling and deliberate fraud associated with the February 25 presidential election.
Peterside who has been involved in polling and observing election trends in Nigeria for over a decade and believes he has a fair expectation of how well the parties will do in certain locations, said he was not satisfied with the results declared by INEC “because I have seen too many irregularities.”
In a wide-ranging interview on Arise television where he sought to provide stunning evidence of how results of the presidential election were manipulated in Lagos, Imo, Rivers and Bauchi states, Peterside said on account of what he believes transpired that it was premature to be congratulating anyone declared winner by the Independent National Election Commission, INEC.
According to the activist who acknowledged that he voted for Labour party in the election, “we have become the laughingstock. A football match was played the other day where Liverpool scored seven goals against Man United which got zero. Now one of the jokes in Lagos is that somebody changes the score to read 7 for Man United and O for Liverpool and then says INEC has changed the results. Nigeria is now the laughingstock.”
He then went on to present details of the cases in Imo for instance where INEC has uploaded results for a constituency which is signed by only an INEC official but not a single party polling agent signed, and he said the results which INEC gave showed APC getting 600 votes. “Possibly that INEC can explain this where only their own official Mbakwe signed the result sheet,” Peterside said.
In another case in Rivers state, Labour’s votes of 223 were then switched to APC in a result sheet that is visibly altered, tipexed and according to him bastardized.
He in one polling Unit in Bauchi Local government area, Labour scored 199 votes but when the entire results for the local government were uploaded, Labour’s votes had shrunk to a mere 185 with APC getting 11,862 votes.
Peterside spoke about another situation in Lagos for which he presented two result sheets from the same location. The result sheet claimed by a party agent is clean and without alterations while the result sheet uploaded by INEC has massive alterations and the results clearly had been changed in favour of a political party. “This is the trend that is emerging”, Peterside said.
The ANAP founder said while he has seen results and alterations which even a blind man can identify, he will caution against going on street protests at this point because there was need now to conduct more investigations, present the evidence to the courts and so let us see if the judges will say it is okay to allow these wide spread alterations and results which even a blind person can see as having been bastardized.
