The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) may have stirred the hornet’s bees after it raised a scandal over the identity of “Dr. Dickson Ariaga” that announced the Rivers State presidential election result.
In a previous publication, News Band reported that BBC’s findings indicated that Nigeria’s presidential election results were manipulated in some states, especially in Rivers State with Nyesom Wike as the Governor.
According to the report, there was an increase of over 106,000 in the votes accruable to the All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential candidate, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, in the official tally by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) which it compared with BBC’s tally.
The report further revealed that Tinubu’s vote was six times larger in INEC tally, while the votes of the Labour Party (LP) presidential candidate, Mr. Peter Gregory Obi, were cut in half.
However, BBC seemed to have raised the roof in the report when it cast a cloud of doubts over “the mystery surrounding Dickson Ariaga” involving the real identity.
The medium noted that in a live broadcast on television on 27 February, in front of a bank of microphones, the Oyigbo election official, Dickson Ariaga, announced his name and added 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,” the report noted.
Following the announcement of results, the notoriety with the results announced, compared to those published on the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) Results Viewing (IREV) portal, including errors, alterations, and inconsistencies INEC did on election results and on its website left many unanswered questions.
BBC, therefore, requested audience with Dr Ariaga from the electoral commission but no one would give his details or reach out to him.
Sensing a red flag, BBC asked the election official seated next to Dr Ariaga but she said she was not authorised to talk to the press.
Not satisfied with the trajectory of the investigation, the medium sent a reporter to the Federal College of Education in Omoku, about two hours drive north of Port Harcourt, where Ariaga said he worked while introducing himself.
To their shock and chagrin, 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.”
BBC reported: “We 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 we compared an image from this account to the television pictures of Dr Ariaga using Amazon Rekognition software, we 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 us to this account.
“By reaching out to his Facebook friends we did finally manage to speak to a man who said he was a relative, who was at first willing to help us but then didn’t return our calls,” it added.
Johnson Sinikiem, INEC’s regional spokesman in Port Harcourt, said 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, in the meantime, approached INEC headquarters in Abuja for response to its findings of discrepancies in the results in Rivers State and were told that 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,” BBC concluded.
It noted, though, that the altered results would not have decisively swayed the outcome of the presidential election as Tinubu won the national presidential vote by 1.8 million votes over his nearest rival, Atiku Abubakar of the PDP.
Meanwhile, BBC said it is still looking for Dr Ariaga to respond to the findings in this report.
One pertinent hovering question begging for answers, in the interim, is: “Who is Dickson Ariaga that announced Rivers’ presidential election result?” Read more.
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