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A former National Commissioner of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Mustapha Lecky,  has asserted that the commission over-promised Nigerians by pledging to transmit results electronically from the polling units during the 2023 general elections.

According to him, the Information Communication Technology (ICT) unit of the Commission does not have the competency and capacity to handle any technical hitches in the system, we learnt.

The former INEC Commissioner, while featuring on Channels Television’s Politics Today on Tuesday, pointed out that INEC should have stuck with the manual process knowing it was not yet matured technologically.

However, while the Commission successfully transmitted other results during the 2023 general election, it failed to transmit those of the presidential election of February 25, 2023, in real-time.

A development that has led to accusations of compromise on the part of the Commission.

But Lecky insisted that the electoral umpire was not mature enough to work the technology it promised.

The former commissioner maintained that INEC should not have promised what it was not capable of delivering considering the uncertainties surrounding the Nigerian political situation.

He submitted that “They tried those things in the US (United States), you saw what happened, they were hacking it. So, how many people do you have in the INEC? I worked in INEC, and I know the ICT guys, good guys, good ladies that work there, they are not as resilient to be able to rise to the challenge if their system is being hacked.

“The staff there don’t have that kind of competence to be able to respond to any manner of disruption technologically. Just (a) few guys that are there, you talk about advanced countries like the US that were struggling and then you are talking about Nigeria, how are they going to rise to it?

“So, the issue of over-promising damaged the reputation of INEC and that should not have happened.”