Festus Keyamo reveals how INEC staff worked with Atiku Abubakar to upload fake presidential results

The Director of Strategic Communications of President Buhari 2019 Presidential Campaign, Festus Kayamo, isn’t done releasing what he described as “dirty secret” of Alhaji Atiku Abubakar and how the presidential candidate of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) is working to dubiously unseat President Muhammadu Buhari.

The unsatisfied Adamawa-born politician had challenged the victory of the candidate of All Progressive Congress (APC) at the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal.

He told the court to nullify the official result announced by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), claiming that INEC tampered with the result to favour Buhari, a retired Army General.

In the result announced by INEC, Buhari got 15,191,847 votes to defeat Atiku, who got  11,262,978. He lost to Buhari with a margin of 3,928,869 votes.

Surprisingly, the former vice president on April 17, according to Daily Post, released his own result where he claimed that he defeated Buhari and alleged that INEC tampered with the presidential election results. He claimed that he scored a total of 18,356,732 votes to Buhari’s 16,741,430 votes.

Since he filed his suit at the tribunal, more political flavour was added to the argument when the APC legal of which Festus Keyamo is a member said the PDP candidate wasn’t from Nigeria. Atiku has defended himself and proved to the court his real citizenship.

Another argument which came up was the hacking of INEC server. Atiku at a time said he was ready to bring foreign experts from IBM and other tech giants as witnesses.

However, Keyamo, on his verified Twitter handle on April 25, 2019, said the claim by some staff members of the electoral body that they were instructed to send the result to the INEC server was connivance between them and Atiku and his party (PDP).

The legal luminary, who is known to have handled controversial matters in the past tweeted:

“Without referring to any particular pending Election Petition, there’s a need to generally guide Nigerians not to gullibly fall for the fantasy created by any video circulating where INEC official(s) spoke of INEC’s plan to electronically transmit results before the elections.

“The video(s) of some INEC official(s) expressing intention to electronically transmit results are only circulated for entertainment. That procedure is neither contained in the Electoral Act nor in INEC’s Guidelines. Courts are only guided by these documents and not such videos.”

He said there was no point for Atiku to quote INEC server as his source since the electoral body said it dropped the idea of using it.

“Also, what you plan to do may be different from what you ACTUALLY DID. Assuming INEC planned to transmit electronically, the moment it said after the election that it did not do so, the matter ends there especially as the Electoral Act & the Guidelines do not allow it to do so.”

“In anticipation of the electronic transmission, some crooks concocted fictitious results and perhaps in connivance with certain INEC insiders (or by hacking) tried to upload those results into the server. The fact that electronic transmission didn’t happen destroyed their plan,” he tweeted.

According to Keyamo, Atiku and PDP perpetrated all evils to win the election, which according to him failed.

“The irony is that the real cheats are the ones struggling to create a narrative that they were cheated; the real crooks are the ones struggling to convince everyone that the system is crooked; those who actually planned to steal the people’s mandate are the ones crying foul.”

The political drama continues. Political observers say it will take extra effort for the PDP candidate to unseat the incumbent president at the tribunal.

Thousands of PDP supporters and the party have expressed optimism that Atiku “will” win at the tribunal.