Why INEC Redeployed Our ICT Director Before the 2023 Elections

Chidi Nwafor, the Independent National Electoral Commission’s (INEC) director in charge of information and communication technology (ICT), was reassigned a few months prior to the 2023 general elections, and INEC has defended the move.

There have been various theories as to what could have gone wrong after INEC failed to upload the real-time results of the February 25 presidential election from the polling places to its platform. Several have claimed that the commission was missing Nwafor’s experience.

Festus Okoye, the INEC National Commissioner, stated that no department is established on a certain person while addressing on Channels Television’s Sunday Politics.

“The commission’s current leadership seeks to create a professional organization that is not centered on a single person.

The person (Nwafor) who was mentioned is a very close friend of mine; he serves as a director for the commission, and any director may be transferred elsewhere or choose to work as an administrative secretary,” Okoye added.

“Well, at the time we revised the list of administrative secretaries, the commission was getting ready for elections and little anxious about whether we would have new resident electoral commissioners.

In order to go and prepare the states for the sake of the election, the commission wisely determined that we would post our finest hands to the various states as administrative secretaries. And that is exactly what the commission did.

We have a department in charge of information and communications technology, and the Chidi I know strived to create a department that can stand on its own whether he is there or not. The same is true for every department, he continued.

Okoye blamed “technical issues” that have been fixed in time for the March 18 gubernatorial and state assembly elections for INEC’s failure to deliver polling unit results immediately to its webpage in real time as it had promised before the elections.

He guaranteed that the commission’s Result Viewing Portal (IReV) would be operational on Election Day, March 18.