The governorship candidate of the All Progressive Grand Alliance, (APGA), Charles Soludo, has described the INEC Biometric Voters Accreditation System, (BVAS), as a complete failure.
Soludo felt highly disappointed when he arrived at his polling unit in PU Isuofia, Aguata LGA to cast his vote on Saturday afternoon.
Since the opening of the poll at 002, Ward, Ofiyi Square, where the former CBN boss was to cast his vote, the BVAS has been epileptic and inconsistent, thereby contributing to the growing concerns of the waiting electorates.
The Professor arrived at his PU at exactly 12:12 pm, but was unable to cast his vote after 20 minutes of frantic efforts by the electoral body’s technician to restore the system to enable the electorates, many of who are already growing tired, to exercise their franchise.
Soludo, who was visibly troubled by the development, said, “The fundamental thing is that the technology collapsed; this BVAS technology of a thing is a complete failure. If it could still be rectified, that would be in minutes or hours to come, and by 12:30 voting is yet to start in many polling units.
“With the crowd that you can see here, hundreds of people here, you don’t need to be a mathematician to know that even if the machine starts working now, the machine won’t be ready in 15, 20 minutes. Even if it takes a minute to accredit each person here, you are not going to finish this in record time.”
He said the challenges raise fundamental questions about the technology and further tabled his displeasure at the system. “This is all over the State. I got calls from virtually all the local government areas and the story is the same”, he said.
As at the time of filing this report, Soludo has left the polling unit, while his aides were seen hanging around, perhaps to possibly keep tabs on the situation and notify him when the system is rectified.
