A former chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Professor Attahiru Jega has said that the commission must prove the reason it failed to upload the presidential poll results to the INEC results viewing portal (IreV).

He insisted that if the commission was confident of its planning process then it should confidently take the blame if there is failure.

The former INEC boss said, “And if you are so confident with the planning process, and at the end of it all, there is a failure somewhere, you will take the blame because you are the leader.

“But it does not mean you are the one who has deliberately done it because you are compromised. We need to be fair in our assessment.”

Speaking further, Jega explained that before he left the commission, an evaluation of the success and failure rate of the card reader was carried out.

“The card reader failed in five percent of places of deployment which is 95 percent success. But the pressmen and politicians were just focused on where it failed. But it can never be perfect,” Jega said.

“I can tell you that the BVAS that was developed to replace the card reader is of significant value to the electoral process. The major failure experienced during the polls relates to the upload to the IREV as promised by the chairman.

“I think we need to interrogate why the uploading, specifically with regards to the presidential election, failed.

“This needs to be done, not just in-house by INEC, but in a very transparent manner. I think there will be a lot of revelations with regards to what happened in order to properly apportion blame to who is responsible for what happened,” he added.