TheCable

Muhammadu Buhari, candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the February 14, 2015 presidential election, has revealed that he had no chance of winning the 2011 election because the computers of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) were programmed to cut his votes by 40 per cent.

Speaking on Wednesday at the the general election sensitisation workshop on non-violence organised by the office of the national security adviser to the president and the office of the special adviser to the president on inter-party affairs, Buhari said the manipulation was discovered when agents of his party compared results obtained on the field with what was available on INEC computers.

“In 2011, I said that I, as presidential candidate, would not go to court. But I made sure my party went to court. We spent about nine months, and again it was the same story. There’s no way the ruling party would lose judgement,” he said.

“In 2011, from two states in the northern part of the country, we were lucky to get competent party agents. When results started coming in from some of the big states, we tried to get the results that were announced, that were physically brought to the INEC headquarters in Abuja.

“Then we compared the results against the INEC results, and put it in the computer, and the adage, ‘cabbage in cabbage out’ manifested itself. What came out was that the presidential candidate of that party was programmed to lose 40% of its scores.

“When it was done in another state, it 60% or it was 26%. The agents made a presentation and showed it to them. Of course, INEC officials in charge of the states must be computer literate; we showed them: ‘This is what we got from the field; we put it into your computer, and the computer has been programmed to discount us by 26%’.

“They said okay. They said yes; let the party write. The party wrote, quoting the example. We were even assured by INEC that they would look into it. The next thing we saw was the result being announced that we had lost that election.

“In 2011, some of you know that retired Justice Salami headed the tribunal for the presidential candidates, which starts from the high court, and again we made our presentation that in a number of states the election was not conducted according to electoral act. The states were mentioned, and we demanded the register to be brought to court to prove our case.

“The panel looked at it and they wrote INEC to produce it. It was not produced; Justice Salami was redeployed another justice was brought who reversed that decision that has become history.”

Buhari argued that before every election, there must be an electoral act, which was the case in 2002 for the 2003 election, in 2006 for the 2007 election, in 2010 for the 2011 election. Last year, for a certain part of December, I was waiting for the electoral act for this year’s election, I am yet to see one.”