Festus Okoye, a former National Commissioner of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), has disclosed that the commission’s digital platforms came under several cyberattacks during the 2023 presidential election.
Okoye made the revelation during an interview on Deep Insights, a podcast hosted by Austin Agbonsuremi.
The former INEC commissioner, who was responsible for voter education, also provided an account of the technical difficulties that disrupted the uploading of polling unit results to the commission’s Result Viewing Portal, known as IReV, during the election.
Ahead of the 2023 general elections, INEC had assured Nigerians that results from polling units would be uploaded to IReV, an online platform designed to allow voters, political parties, candidates, election observers and other stakeholders to independently access scanned copies of result sheets.
The platform was expected to provide greater transparency by making polling unit results available for public viewing in near real time.
However, on the day of the presidential election, IReV remained inactive for a prolonged period even after voting had ended at several polling units. The delay generated widespread concern and suspicion, particularly among Nigerians who had expected the platform to provide timely access to election results.
Okoye said the commission initially encountered difficulties uploading the results and believed the problem would be resolved within a short period.
According to him, it soon became apparent that the problem was more serious than initially anticipated.
“What really happened was that the technology malfunctioned. That is the truth of the matter. For me, technology disappointed us. I said, okay, we need to tell Nigerians that this is the difficulty we are having and that we are trying to fix it,” he said.
Okoye said the commission subsequently prepared a statement to explain the situation to the public, but he objected to the technical terminology initially used to describe the problem.
He said this disagreement eventually contributed to the use of the term “glitch” in explaining the failure of the platform.
“And that was how the issue of glitch came into the equation,” he said.
The former commissioner described the incident as particularly frustrating because of the extensive preparations that had gone into the election.
He said INEC officials had invested significant time and effort in preparing for the polls, making the failure of the technology especially disappointing.
Okoye also revealed that INEC’s digital platforms were subjected to several cyberattacks during the election period.
“I know that there were all sorts of cyberattacks on our platforms during that particular period,” he said.
He, however, cautioned against directly linking the cyberattacks to the problems experienced by IReV, saying he could not establish whether the attacks had any impact on the platform’s performance.
“Whether those cyberattacks influenced what happened at the end of the day, I’m not in a position to say,” Okoye said.
The former commissioner added that INEC’s deputy director in charge of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) later appeared before the election petition tribunal to provide an explanation of the technical difficulties encountered during the election.
The disruption to IReV became one of the major controversies surrounding the 2023 presidential election, as parties and other stakeholders questioned why the platform failed to display polling unit results as expected.
Okoye’s latest comments provide further insight into the technical challenges faced by INEC during the election, while stopping short of establishing that the reported cyberattacks were responsible for the IReV disruption.
