Peter Obi: Osaze-Uzzi reacts as Appeal Court okays INEC request to reconfigure BVAS

Mr Oluwole Osaze-Uzzi, a former Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, Director of Publicity and Voter Education, has reacted to Court of Appeal’s decision to grant the prayer by the Commission to reconfigure the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, BVAS, ahead of the state polls.

Speaking on Arise Television’s The Morning Show on Thursday, Osaze-Uzzi said that all data in the BVAS can be saved.

He said, “Well, I am not a technical expert, but from my experience, I know that the information and data contained in the BVAS can be saved, it can be backed up both in clouds and servers. You do not necessarily have to tamper with it to configure it.

“People have to understand what reconfiguration means. I know, for example, that these machines were configured to start at 8.30am in the last election on February 25 and now, to use it for another, you have to reconfigure it to a specific date of the election.

“Accreditation figures or no figures should be put into the BVAS until the time limited to opening the port. and automatically, as a program unit, it shuts down at a particular time it is expected that everybody who was on the queue at 2.30 pm would have voted, so if it doesn’t shut down at 2.30 pm but a period of grace, maybe 4, 5 or 6 hours so that it can enable the device take care of everybody.

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“But automatically, it would shut down and thereafter, you cannot accredit anybody unless and until you reconfigured it again. But yes, you can save all the data information.”

Recall that the Court of Appeal, Abuja, had on Wednesday turned down the request of the Labour Party’s Presidential candidate, Mr Peter Obi, seeking to stop the INEC from reconfiguring the BVAS equipment used for the conduct of the February 25 Presidential election.

The Court held that granting the request would jeopardize the electoral body in the conduct of the governorship and State Houses of Assembly elections later this month.

The Court agreed with INEC that information on accreditation contained in the BVAS devices had been uploaded into its backup server and could be accessed at any time.