 All right, welcome back in time for our first major conversation right here on the breakfast. The ongoing reconfiguration of the bimodal photo accreditation system machines used during the presidential and national assembly elections on the 25th of February, we are going to end within the next 24 hours. The independent national electoral commission on Sunday said over 170,000 polling units results of the February 25th presidential and national assembly elections have been uploaded on its result viewing portal RF, which means just over a few thousand to go. The commission had postponed the governorship and state houses of assembly elections, as you well know, which were scheduled to hold on March 11 to March 18, which is a new date, in order to be able to reconfigure the bivers. Consequently, all activities pertaining to elections were rescheduled, including the inspection of sensitive materials at the central bank of Nigeria by the political parties. However, this reconfiguring of the bimodal photo accreditation system devices has continued to generate mixed reactions from Nigerians. And joining us to discuss this, we have media and political communication specialists who chances, via Zoom, from the nation's capital, Apuja, Dr. Lo Mefo. Dr. Mefo, good morning, thank you very much for your time. Thank you. Thank you for having me. All right. Good morning, Nigerians. What is your understanding of the timeline for inspection of the sensitive election materials or electoral materials as ordered by the independent, by the, sorry, by the presidential elections petition called, because some Nigerians are confused. It's not really clear. The court of appeal, in its ruling, gave the go-ahead to INEC to reconfigure the devices, saying that not giving INEC that approval would amount to tying INEC's hands, but also in the same vein said that the parties, political parties, namely Labour Party, and PDP could go ahead to inspect the devices now. Lopu asking when this inspection will take place. Is it taking place before the governorship election or after the election? So it's a dilemma, if you ask me, because when the court of appeal that serves as the tribunal in the presidential election has given the order that the Labour Party and the, of course, the PDP should inspect the sensitive materials. But again, if you recall, INEC procured less than 200,000 pieces of beavers. What that means is that if they cannot say, you know, use the same beavers for governorship election in a manner as not to tamper with the results captured by the beavers during the presidential election, then there is going to be a problem. And that is the argument INEC has made to advance the need for them to reconfigure, to be able to make the space for governorship election. I looked at the order of the court of appeal and, of course, what the court of appeal also said to INEC in authorizing it to reconfigure. So you can reconfigure, but you just have to be sure that the data captured by beavers during presidential elections are not tampered with in any way. And INEC assured that the court of appeal that the data will be saved in the back-end server and that would preserve and then, of course, the court of appeal also would that the labor particularly should be given a satisfactory copy of that data or information saved. You know, I think that is the more the court of appeal can do. One, they assured that the inspection can still take place even after the governorship election. And for me, I think that is when that will be possible. Because if you check the enormity of data involved, we're talking about 176,606 in the polling unit results. It's going to take quite a bit of time. So it's not something that can happen before Saturday. And I am also, should I say, yeah, I think I'm aware that the inspection has not actually started. And, of course, you and I know that INEC is focusing on the governorship election at the moment. And it may not be expedient for them to give a sufficient attention to the inspection, because they have to be physically available also. And their top management staff are all being mobilized for the governorship election. So I believe it is only reasonable to expect the inspection to commence after the governorship election, which comes up this Saturday. I don't know. I expected that INEC ought to have anticipated this and probably procure double the number of beavers they did procure so that a different set of beavers will be devoted to governorship election so that we wouldn't have to reconfigure. I say this because I really don't know. I'm not an ICT expert here, particularly to understand the way a beaver works. Initially, I had expected that beavers should be able to handle both, excuse me, that beavers should be able to handle both governorship presidential election without having to be reconfigured. That is my layman understanding of how such a thing should work. But now that they said they have to reconfigure, it became a bit confusing for me. And then my inquiry is also in a show that they could still have used the beavers without reconfiguring. And this is something I want plus TV to try and confirm because if they can use the beavers, if they can use the beavers the way it is without reconfiguring and without the governorship election overriding the information that exists in the beavers captured during the presidential election, I think it would have been safer to do it that way if that my assumption is correct. And like I said, I'm not too sure that that is what it ought to be. But my little research shows that you don't really need to reconfigure beavers. You don't need to reconfigure beavers. The memory is that it can carry much more data. Because we are not talking about a single beavers here. We are talking about 176,000 of them. So each beaver should be able to carry enough data. What that means is that if they really invest in this situation, they should have been able to map out the beavers in such a way as to create departments, compartmentalize in a way as to show the information or data pertaining to presidential election and the data captured for governorship. That's what it ought to be. And I'm talking about total reconfiguration. Now, it's a bit worrisome for me. I say this, advisedly, because if you reconfigure after saving in the back end server, as they say, what is the guarantee that the fidelity over the information saved is guaranteed. I don't know. And the INEC is doing this all by itself without anybody. The political party representatives are not taking part in the storage process, because you know already INEC credibility is suffering. So I fear that by the time the inspection would now start, there may be another round of argument that the information stored is tampered with. And if we get to that pass, it's going to be very devastating. Because like I said, the credibility of INEC is already suffering. They haven't done well because they abandoned both their guidelines and the electoral act and collated the results without making any reference to the transmitted the results from polling units as clearly stipulated in the electoral act, particularly section 64, subsection 4, which says the coalition or returning officer will have to compare and confirm. So the two words used in that provision is that the coalition or returning officer will declare, collate the results and declare, subject to confirmation and verification of the figures. Two figures that must be verified before you collate. Figure one is that is the number of people accredited, which only the people can authenticate. And then the second figure is the number of votes received by the candidates or the political parties. So it means that you can't even declare results without first uploading. So the upfront loading of results from the polling units is abandoned by INEC, putting into jeopardy the entire presidential election. So I said this because the labor and PDP, they are both claiming that they won the election. And the only way they can prove it is to compare what Bivans are captured at the polling units. And the Bivans are reconfigured. So how shall are we that the storage of the information gathered by Bivans? That's where my question, I mean that's my next question to you now. So we understand that INEC from your analysis had not followed to the latter, the laws and the regulations, the electoral act, the constitutional as to the conduct of that elections. And so there's a lot of trust deficit in the entire process. But following the reconfiguration of the Bivans, INEC has made claims to the fact that they have back-end servers to hold information on the Bivans. Should that not be enough for Nigerians and political parties to allow this entire process go through without casting aspersion? Even the credibility of the INEC, we are not suffering. We wouldn't be talking about this at all. But because the way the manner they conducted the presidential election left so much to be desired. That is why everybody is looking at INEC with reasonable suspicion. And I think INEC have brought this upon themselves. And that is why I said that look, we just have to pray that the two main opposition political parties, GDP and labor, do not raise the question of integrity of the data, the information saved in the back-end server. Even if they don't raise that debt, there will be a problem. But I tell you that even if any of those two major political parties raise the information, raise the objection that what they saved is not really authentic data or that the data has been tampered with, then we are in very deep trouble. And I say this because if you recall, I made an earlier allusion. I say that my little knowledge of Bivans is that it could have been used to have a reconfigure. So even that is true. And they reconfigured, despite the fact that each Bivans has the capacity to double up for governorship election, then I think we have no answer what that can be proved that the tribunal. In other words, they can be reasonably accused of tampering with the information they stored as inauthentic, as not being the exact information. Yes. When we say INEC is tampering with the Bivans, this is a device that they own. This is a device that before the election, they set up. This is a device that they brought. This is a device that will be in the custody of the election. They are the ones who organize the election. So there is nothing that INEC cannot do. Like a pastor says, what can they do? There is nothing they can do. It is in their possession. When we say tampering, I believe INEC has the right, the powers. This is their election. They are the organizers. They are the own party. Can I tell you something? Yes. So when we say they are tampering with their own property, how can you tamper with your own property? No. No. That is number one, sir. That is number one. Sorry, please. How sure are we that the commission, maybe if they faced some sort of attack, some sort of hack, for instance, may not want to change some settings to make sure that nobody is able to access these devices from a remote location. Well, you see, like I said, the trusted deficit is brought upon INEC by INEC itself. When the INEC review portal was shut down, either by whatever glitch or deliberate process initiated by INEC, ICT department itself, whatever it is, the presidential election results could not be uploaded from the polling units. And then this is inexplicable. There is something you say that they own this year's they own it. But the beavers are manufactured. It's not independent. It's not an independent machine like you say. Excuse me. Sorry about that. It's not independent. It's not independent as such because it shares some digital infrastructure with the super highways like Hammersome and so on and so forth. So whatever they do with the beavers in Nigeria cannot be, you know, sorry, whatever they do with. All right, Neto seems to have interrupted our guest there. But we'll try to get back to him. Dr. Law Mepho, are you back with us? And can you hear us? All right. I'm told that Dr. Mepho is not with us for now. But he was giving his thoughts on the fact that we responded to a question I asked earlier about the beavers. And INEC having the right, the powers, okay, to organize this election, to set up their devices, you know, it's like you holding your phone and, you know, you volunteer to give that phone out for some purpose. And then later you say you want to check something on the phone. And so say you want to tamper with your phone. I mean, but Dr. Mepho has used this term. He says trust deficit indeed. That is one of the reasons why a lot of people are still suspicious of the motives of the Independent National Electric Commission. But merci. It's quite interesting to note that for me, one question I would have loved to ask Dr. Mepho was, you know, we have the beavers, we have the, you know, INEC results viewing portal, which is known as the IRF. And he was talking about the fact that, you know, at some point, they couldn't upload some, you know, of the results, namely the presidential election. A lot of the INEC agents, polling unit agents, polling unit officers, sorry, were saying that they could log in to upload the national assembly elections. So when it came to the presidential elections, the password wasn't going through. Now, is it possible there was a glitch somewhere and the commission is not making it public because of the sensitivity of the situation and they're trying to fix it? Is it possible? You know, but at the end of the day, another question to be answered is the results were being uploaded live real-time until we had this problem and they could not upload all the results. But as we speak, 170,000 at least of the polling unit results have been uploaded, you know, and even the ones that we have discrepancies based on the actions of some of the INEC with coalition officers who took pen and then changed some results. These results are their lifetime. One can go on and look at them. For instance, Sam Amadi, formerly of NEC, who is a professor these days, a professor of law at Bayes University, well, owned by Dati Babame, that's a caveat, put out a tweet some days ago and love also said the same thing. You know, you know, APC, what they know, that was a local government area, that took three days to send their results to Podhakot and the coalition officer was missing. I'm sure you had tired of me seeing this thing. But that's the local government that gave the APC presidential candidate victory in Riverstake. Now, what he said is, quote, LGA result on INEC portal LP 70,186, APC 12,547, says meanwhile, quote, quote, meanwhile INEC announced something different, APC 80,239, LP 3,829. So these results are there, except babies, they start changing them. The results are there. So if they, if they, if they, um, be versus tampered with mercy or not, what will they change? It's a question I wish Mulomeh for could answer. No, you know, so from the inception, I mean, if you, if you look at it, uh, when he was answering the question that I had asked and he talked about the fact that if the integrity of INEC was not in question, we probably will not be in the first instance. It's simple. I don't even think that there's any, you know, logical explanation to all of this. If, you know, there was stipulation asked to how this election should be conducted. If there were guide, you know, laid down rules, if we had said that the reason why we introduced the beavers into the electoral process was because we needed to curb some of the excesses of our electoral electioneering over the years and the issue of, you know, doctoring figures and what have you, uh, trying to manipulate and do all sorts of things. And that's why we introduced the beavers. Now, if you look at that part of the electoral act, he talked about transmitting the result at the polling unit. So when we now have the result not transmitted at the polling unit days after, weeks after, you know, it's just, it's just not enough for people because if we had gone by the rules and like you had mentioned, I like some of the things that you raise. You said, you know, in your words that this election is an INEC election, right? You said that this is the election. They had the right, you know, to conduct this election. And, you know, they had how many years to plan for this election? We had also had test form of this election in two states, you know, using the beavers and a lot of assurances and all of that. And so how come we even, you know, raise question as to the, the service providers in terms of network as to the conduct of this election? And all of that, you know, there were a lot of, you know, assurances and what have you. So how then did we not get it right? So that's the question. I'm being told that we have a guest. We have to go. We have to go. We have to go. These are the issues. Anyway, we'll be back to have all conversations right here on the breakfast. Please stay with us.