The 2023 presidential election results on the Independent National Electoral Commission’s Results Viewing Portal, IReV, are currently returning an error message, even as results for other elections conducted during the exercise remain accessible on the platform.

The development has raised fresh questions about the availability and integrity of the presidential election results, coming shortly after Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Nyesom Wike, made new revelations about the political strategy used during the 2023 presidential election.

Checks on the IReV platform showed that while results relating to the National Assembly elections could be accessed, the presidential election section was displaying an error message instead of providing access to the expected results.

The development is particularly significant because INEC had previously acknowledged that the presidential election results encountered a separate technical problem on IReV during the 2023 election.

According to INEC’s official review of the 2023 general election, uploads of the Senate and House of Representatives results were successful, but attempts to upload presidential election result sheets initially returned an HTTP server error.

The electoral commission attributed the failure to a configuration problem which prevented the system from properly creating the folder structure required to organise presidential result sheets.

INEC said it subsequently deployed software “hotfixes” to resolve the problem and that the first presidential result sheet was successfully uploaded at 8:55pm on February 25, 2023.

The renewed accessibility problem has now emerged against the backdrop of fresh comments by Wike about the 2023 presidential election and the political calculations that influenced the results in Rivers State.

Speaking during an interview on TVC’s Journalists’ Hangout, Wike disclosed that the defunct G-5 governors deliberately prevented Peter Obi from winning Rivers State during the 2023 presidential election.

Wike explained that the G-5’s strategy was designed largely to stop the then-Peoples Democratic Party presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, from benefiting from the PDP’s strength in the South-South.

According to Wike, the group allowed Obi’s Labour Party to benefit from votes in some South-South states but deliberately made Rivers an exception.

He said the G-5 had decided that Obi should not win Rivers because such a victory would “send a signal somewhere,” adding that “we stopped it.”