The amended electoral bill must be signed by the president to become law...

A media aide to President Bola Tinubu, Sunday Dare, said the president is unlikely to assent to the amended Electoral Act, particularly provisions mandating real-time electronic transmission of election results.

Dare, the president’s special adviser on media and public communication, spoke during an appearance on Arise TV.

He said Nigeria lacked sufficient internet capacity to support real-time upload of polling unit results to the Independent National Electoral Commission’s (INEC) Result Viewing (IREV) portal.

According to him, the president would consider the country’s current internet infrastructure before deciding whether to sign the bill into law.

“I can assure you that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, a renowned democrat, will do what is right, but it will not be in isolation of the realities of our country,” Dare said.

He added that Nigeria’s limited network coverage could not handle the data volume required for real-time electronic transmission of results.

“There’s no 100 per cent real-time transmission anywhere. Are you telling me that this country as it is, is networked enough to have a 100 per cent electronic process?” he said.

The issue of electronic transmission has sparked nationwide debate and divided the Senate, with some lawmakers alleging that Senate President Godswill Akpabio removed a clause requiring upload of results to INEC’s IREV portal.

Following protests at the National Assembly, the clause was reinstated.

During the February 2023 presidential election, the IREV portal experienced outages for more than six hours, which officials attributed to technical glitches.

Twenty-four hours after Tinubu was declared winner, INEC had uploaded only 11 per cent of the results.