Technology expert calls for forensic audit of alleged BIVAS failure during 2023 presidential election

The Co-Founder and CEO of Touch and Pay Technologies Limited, Mr Olamide Afolabi, has called for a forensic audit of the entire infrastructure that was provided to back up the alleged failure of the Bi-Modal Voters Accreditation Machine System (BIVAS).

Afolabi, who stated this during an interview with Arise Television, said the poor performance of the BIVAS was evidence of a poor level of preparation on the part of The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) regarding the 2023 general elections.

Need for Forensic audit: The Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, had come under severe attack over the unimpressive performance of some of the facilities deployed for the presidential and National Assembly elections last Saturday. Afolabi said:

• “I think that the way forward for us regarding this election is that we have very smart people that are very passionate about this election, and people use to come together and ensure that the process of providing technology is credible because I believe that if we are having these problems after we have piloted it, probably we are using one server, so we need to have a kind of forensic audit on the entire infrastructure that was provided to back it up we need to review the architecture to ensure that it is world standard.”

Review session of election results: He also noted that the country needs to have a stakeholder’s review session of the election for results that Nigeria will consider acceptable and believable.

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• “The need for the review is very paramount because we have a gubernatorial election coming in less than two weeks, and I don’t think anybody will want a country where people will start questioning the credibility of the work of INEC,” he said.

High expectations for BIVAS: Afolabi said that technology is expected to provide efficiency and confidence and if it is unable to do that, then the nation may as well go back to the old way of doing things instead of adopting technology that is now making it worse.

• “We have very smart technology providers as Nigerians that are vendors that some of us use obviously because we can’t post Nigerian financial data outside.”

They provide us with that kind of service and is going to be interesting to be told that we don’t have that type of technology backing up our electoral process.

• “What I think will happen now is that whoever is responsible for the tech should come out and show us architecture and what is accountable to these hitches and let us know why before the gubernatorial elections. We need people to see transparency, What the agitation was and why did the BIVAS fail. And if it didn’t fail, they need to reassure us why they feel it didn’t fail,” he said

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