Former Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) National Commissioner for Voter Education, Dr Festus Okoye, has said the Labour Party’s lack of organisational structure, rather than the failure of the commission’s Result Viewing Portal (IReV), was responsible for the party’s inability to win the 2023 general election.
Okoye said political parties must establish effective structures at the polling-unit, ward, local government and state levels to monitor elections and collate results independently, instead of relying on INEC’s IReV portal.
He stated this on Friday during a training session organised for reporters of THE WHISTLER newspaper in preparation for the 2027 elections.
The former INEC commissioner argued that political parties should obtain election results directly from their polling agents and transmit the figures through their internal structures.
“What are the parties collating? The results should come from their polling agents,” he said.
“The ward chairman should collate reports from agents at each polling unit and forward them through the various levels.”
Okoye questioned the organisational capacity of some political parties, saying their existence was sometimes more evident in law than in their actual operations across the country.
He described some of them as “mushroom parties” and “commercial entities for hire”, arguing that parties without functional structures could not effectively monitor elections or protect their interests during collation.
Citing his experience with election administration, he recalled that the Labour Party did not have a candidate for the Kebbi State House of Assembly election during one of the elections he supervised.
“Labour Party had no State Assembly candidate in Kebbi,” he said.
He also recounted his experience supervising elections in Kebbi and Adamawa states, using the incidents to illustrate what he described as the weak organisational capacity of some political parties.
On the controversy surrounding the 2023 presidential election results, Okoye said political parties appeared to have relied on IReV as their collation mechanism instead of maintaining effective independent arrangements.
He said, “The parties were disorganised. They were using IReV as their collator.”
According to him, the technical difficulties encountered during the uploading of presidential election results contributed to the controversy surrounding the election.
He explained that while results for the House of Representatives election were being uploaded, the presidential election results were not appearing on the portal as expected.
Okoye said the delay, which initially lasted about 30 minutes, extended to an hour, raising concerns among Nigerians who expected the results to appear in real time.
He recalled that INEC’s information and communications technology officials worked on a programme to address the problem, after which presidential election results began appearing on IReV at about 8:55 p.m.
He, however, maintained that the problem was not that results were never uploaded, but that the process did not happen in real time as expected.
Okoye argued that political parties should not depend on IReV to perform the responsibility of their agents and internal collation structures.
He said party agents should collect results from polling units, while ward and other party officials should collate and transmit the figures through the party’s established channels.
He further maintained that parties should be able to establish their own records of election results before the figures reach the national collation centre.
Okoye also cautioned against accepting politicians’ claims about election outcomes without examining the facts and the processes through which the results were obtained.
He said effective grassroots organisation and the presence of polling agents were essential to election monitoring, adding that parties must take responsibility for building the structures required to protect their votes rather than blame IReV for their organisational shortcomings.
