The BBC has revealed that its investigation into the 2023 presidential election in Nigeria has uncovered evidence of election fraud in Rivers State, one of the most populous and politically significant states in the country.
According to the BBC, its analysis of the photographs of the polling station results sheets published online by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) showed that there were major discrepancies between the polling station tallies and the official results declared at the state level.
The BBC said that its tally suggested that Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) had actually received the most votes in the state by a wide margin, rather than Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC), who was declared the winner of the state and the overall presidential election.
“We found an increase of just over 106,000 in Mr Tinubu’s vote in the official declaration when compared with our polling station tally – almost doubling his total in the state. In contrast, Mr Obi’s vote had fallen by over 50,000,” the report added.
The BBC said that its findings contradicted the claims by Rivers state Governor, Nyesom Wike, who is a member of the PDP and a close ally of Tinubu, that he worked for the victory of the former Lagos governor.
The BBC explained that some were incorrectly uploaded, and others were missing, even after a month from the date of polling, stressing that for about 5 per cent of polling stations, the photos of tally sheets were too blurred to read.
“ It’s reasonable to assume that the official count would have included these as they would have had the original documents,” the report stated.
In another 17 per cent, BBC said that there were no results at all. “Many of these would have been places where no voting took place due to security issues or the non-arrival of voting materials. Others had technical problems preventing officials from uploading the documents,” it posited.
The BBC said that its investigation also raised doubts over the identity of an election official who read out some of the unexplained results and who claimed to work for a college that denied knowing him.
In terms of the biggest discrepancies, the BBC reported that two areas stood out, the first being Oyigbo local government area, where it found that the vote for Tinubu was six times larger in the officially announced results compared with its polling station count. “Peter Obi’s votes had been cut in half,” it stated.
According to the BBC report, the second local government area where it found major discrepancies was in nearby Obio/Akpor where the official result for Tinubu was 80,239 votes, but it counted just 17,293 votes from polling station tallies.
“The count for Mr Obi was announced officially as just 3,829 votes, but the BBC counted 74,033 votes for him on the tally sheets,” it said.
BBC said its investigation also raised doubts over the person of an Oyigbo election official, Dr Dickson Ariaga, who announced his name and that he worked for the Federal College of Education in Omoku.
While other results matched those on the collation sheet the BBC had obtained, it stated that when he reached Mr Tinubu’s APC, instead of saying 2,731 as written on our photograph of the sheet, Ariaga read out “16,630”.
“Then for Mr Obi’s party (LP) the figure changed again – instead of the 22,289 seen on the sheet, he announced “10,784”, more than halving his vote,” it stated.
Indicating that there was some mystery surrounding Ariaga, it said it sent a reporter to the Federal College of Education in Omoku, about two hours drive north of Port Harcourt, where he’d said he worked when introducing himself.
“Deputy Provost Moses Ekpa told the BBC: “From our records, both from our payroll and from our human resources, there is no such a name in our system and we don’t know such a person.”
The BBC said that its findings could have implications for the ongoing legal challenge by Obi and other opposition candidates who are contesting the election outcome in court.
The BBC said that it approached INEC for a response to its findings, but was told that they were unable to comment due to ongoing legal challenges.
When its findings were put to Nigeria’s Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), it noted that Johnson Sinikiem, INEC’s regional spokesman in Port Harcourt, told the news medium that due to a “gross shortage of time and personnel” INEC had needed to take on some people without verifying their identity documents.
“If he had presented himself as a lecturer from (the college in Omoku) and it’s otherwise, then he is dishonest,” the INEC’s regional spokesperson was quoted as saying.
“We also approached INEC’s headquarters in Abuja for a response to our findings of discrepancies in the results in Rivers state. We were told that they were unable to comment due to ongoing legal challenges.
The BBC said that this was just one case in one state in southern Nigeria where the evidence points to the results having been manipulated. It said that it was not able to verify all the results in other states due to missing or blurred photographs of tally sheets.
