A BBC investigation has found evidence suggesting some results from Nigeria’s controversial presidential election may have been manipulated.
The investigation uncovered significant anomalies in Rivers state, a key battleground during the last presidential election.
There are also questions over the identity of an election official who read out some of the unexplained results.
Recall that on 25 February, Nigerians cast their votes at thousands of polling stations across the country.
At each polling station, the votes for the party of each candidate were publicly announced and the results sheets taken for collation first at the ward level, then at local government (LGA) centres.
For the first time in a Nigerian election, photographs of the polling station results sheets were published online by the electoral commission.
This made it possible to add up all the polling station sheets and to compare them with the results declared at the state level.
According to the investigation by BBC, what was found in Rivers state was shocking and fraudulent.
The media outlet said it added up the voting tally sheets from over 6,000 polling stations in Rivers state, where many of the opposition complaints had been made.
While the official result in Rivers state gave a clear majority to Bola Tinubu of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), the tally suggested that Mr Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) had actually received most votes in the state by a wide margin.
It found an increase of just over 106,000 in Mr Tinubu’s vote in the official declaration when compared with the polling station tally – almost doubling his total in the state.
In contrast, Mr Obi’s vote had fallen by over 50,000.
When it searched through the election website for every single one of the 6,866 polling stations in Rivers state, they were not able to obtain results from all of them.
Some were incorrectly uploaded, others were missing, even after a month from the date of polling.
For about 5% of polling stations, the photos of tally sheets were too blurred to read. It’s reasonable to assume that the official count would have included these as they would have had the original documents.
In another 17%, there were no results at all. Many of these would have been places where no voting took place due to security issues or the non-arrival of voting materials. Others had technical problems preventing officials uploading the documents.
So there clearly would have been more polling stations included in the final official results that weren’t included in the BBC investigation.
However, these additional tally sheets would have increased the totals for each party, not decreased them. And what BBC said it found was that the votes for Peter Obi’s Labour Party had decreased sharply in Rivers state.
Two areas where the biggest discrepancies stood out.
The first was the Oyigbo local government area, where BBC found:
The vote for Bola Tinubu was six times larger in the officially announced results compared with the BBC’s polling station count
Peter Obi’s votes had been cut in half
The second local government area where BBC found major discrepancies was in nearby Obio/Akpor:
The official result for Mr Tinubu was 80,239 votes, but it counted just 17,293 votes from polling station tallies
The count for Mr Obi was announced officially as just 3,829 votes, but the BBC counted 74,033 votes for him on the tally sheets
So how did these differences occur?
As explained earlier, all the polling station sheets are collated at local government (LGA) headquarters.
BBC said it also found an official election document with these collated votes for the Oyigbo area, signed by an election official and some of the party agents.
Several different photographs had been taken of it and uploaded on social media accounts.
The numbers in this document closely matched with the tallies for the two leading candidates (Obi and Tinubu).
This would have been one of the 23 collation sheets from LGAs in Rivers state taken to the state capital, Port Harcourt, for the official declaration.
Broadcast live on television on 27 February, in front of a bank of microphones, Oyigbo election official, Dr Dickson Ariaga, announced his name and that he worked for the Federal College of Education in Omoku.
On the recording, the word “Omoku” is indistinct, but there is only one Federal College of Education in Rivers state.
Dr Ariaga then read out the results for each party in alphabetical order, including for all the smaller parties.
They all matched those on the collation sheet the BBC had obtained. But when he reached Mr Tinubu’s APC, instead of saying 2,731 as written on the photograph of the sheet, he read out “16,630”.
Then for Mr Obi’s party (LP) the figure changed again – instead of the 22,289 seen on the sheet, he announced “10,784”, more than halving his vote.
The mystery surrounding Dickson Ariaga
Meanwhile, when BBC asked the electoral commission if they could speak to Dr Ariaga, they refused to give the medium his details.
When the election official seated next to Dr Ariaga was reached out to, she refused to speak to the press.
BBC said it also sent a reporter to the Federal College of Education in Omoku, about two hours drive north of Port Harcourt, where he said he worked when introducing himself.
The Deputy Provost Moses Ekpa told the BBC: “From our records, both from our payroll and from our human resources, there is no such a name in our system and we don’t know such a person.”
Moses Ekpa said the Federal College of Education in Omoku has never heard of Dr Ariaga
BBC also said it tried tracking him down on social media and eventually came across another Facebook account for someone in Port Harcourt, whose profile details had the name Dickson Ariaga.
When it compared an image from this account to the television pictures of Dr Ariaga using Amazon Rekognition software, it achieved a match of 97.2%, indicating a very high probability they’re the same man.
Dr Ariaga did not respond to messages sent by BBC to the Facebook account.
While reacting to BBC disturbing findings, Johnson Sinikiem, Inec’s regional spokesman in Port Harcourt, told the British media outlet that due to a “gross shortage of time and personnel” they had needed to take on some people without verifying their identity documents.
Referring to Dr Ariaga, he said: “If he had presented himself as a lecturer from [the college in Omoku] and it’s otherwise, then he is dishonest.”
BBC also approached Inec’s headquarters in Abuja for a response to their findings of discrepancies in the results in Rivers state. They were unable to comment due to ongoing legal challenges.
This is just one case in one state in southern Nigeria where the evidence points to the results having been manipulated.