Abuja School of Social and Political Thoughts (ASSPT), yesterday, alleged that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) helped rig the 2023 presidential and National Assembly elections for the incumbent political party by shutting down technological safeguard.

It said failure to upload results into INEC’s result viewing portal (IREV) undermined integrity of the elections.

This was disclosed at the presentation of a report, titled ‘Elections Without Democracy: Explanatory Notes in the 2023 Election’, organised in collaboration with Centre for Public Policy and Research (CPPR) in Abuja.

Executive Director of ASSPT, Dr Sam Amadi, said the 2023 election showed Nigeria is not yet a democracy because its elections are neither free nor fair.

He said: “Why would a commission that issued a regulation on electronic transmission of results and officially communicated to Nigerians and the diplomatic community its commitment to follow through on the regulation now refuse to activate that guarantee of transparency and credibility of results?”

It added: “In the March 18 governorship and House of Assembly elections, voters of Igbo ethnic descent were forcibly prevented from voting because the presidential candidate, the incumbent governor of Lagos and his political surrogates accused Igbo of interfering in Lagos politics and mobilised the people to resist that. The police did not intervene to protect the citizenship rights of Igbo.

“What is clear to an objective assessor of Nigerian ‘democracy’ is that we do not yet have a democracy, and our elections are not democratic elections. Our election cannot be competitive if the state has not evolved to competitiveness, where due to the organising norm of state institutions, elections are impossible to be hijacked by incumbents or other powerful networks.”