The Presidential and National Assembly elections here in Bayelsa State, Southern Nigeria were carried out with mixed sentiments.
While voting went smoothly in many parts of the Eight Local Government Areas of the state, some other wards encountered difficulties.
At Otuoke, Ward 13 Unit 39, former Nigerian President, Dr. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, his wife, Dr. Patience Jonathan, and his mother, also came out to perform their civic responsibilities.
Although INEC officials and materials arrived late, accreditation and voting at the wards in Otuoke went on smoothly.
After voting, the former President addressed Journalist saying that he wished Nigeria to conduct peaceful elections. He advised politicians to shun violence and unethical ways of winning elections and compared politicians who win elections through violence, rigging or vote buying, to armed robbers and con men.
He encouraged politicians to support INEC officers to ensure successful elections.
“For us who are politicians, our conducts matter a lot because the whole world is watching us and want us to succeed. Politicians should know that we all own this country and I have told them that nobody’s ambitions are worth the blood of any Nigerian”, he said.
Dr. Jonathan commended INEC for deploying the BIVAS technology and said that it’s an improvement on the previous card readers.
The former Nigerian President then encouraged the winners and those who will not win to accept the results in good faith.
Elsewhere at Opome town in Ogbia Federal Constituency, many were unable to cast their votes due to technical hitches from the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System BVAS machine.
The INEC officer at the unit who identified himself as Simon Innocent explained that logging into the BVAS machines experienced some set back.
He said: “By the time we wanted to start the election process and we wanted to log into the BIVAS machine, the passwords were incorrect. We went back to complain but by the time we came back, it was unit eight (8) information that was showing instead of the unit seven (7) where we are here’’, the INEC Polling Officer-2 said.
He further stated that when eventually he was able to log into the machine, there were information of some numbers of voters in it.
“The machine showed numbers of accredited voters to be zero but numbers of vote to be One Hundred and four. I’m not aware who changed the BIVAS”, Simon Innocent explained.
Meanwhile, at ward 10, unit 4, Amasoma In Southern ijaw LGA, Mr. Amain E complained about the late arrival of the materials to his community.
Mr. Amain also stated that when the materials arrived at about 12 noon, the presidential ballots were absent.
He said only the House of Reps and Senate ballots were brought to his unit and this resulted to a bit of a fracas with the electoral officers on ground.
“The Presidential papers eventually arrived the ward around 4:30pm but we did not start voting in our various units till around after 6.”
For Mr. Odede Whyte, his only complaint was that when he arrived at his polling unit 008, but could not find his name because he had been reallocated to unit 053 at Old commissioner quarter, Opolo Epie community.
Meanwhile, in Yenagoa, the capital of the State, the story was different.
After waiting for long at their polling units for the process to begin, many citizens marched to the INEC office in Yenagoa to express their dissatisfaction with the delay.
The eager voters appealed to INEC to make available the materials needed so they could exercise their franchise.
However, the police, after trying without success to disperse the crowd, began shooting into the air, scaring them into running for safety.
Despite these developments across the state, electoral officers gathered in Opolo community, Yenagoa LGA for the sorting and counting of the votes at about 7:30pm.
While other polling units and wards in Bayelsa State are sorting and counting their votes, four (4) wards in Yenagoa have been scheduled to conduct their own election on the 26th of February, 2023 from 10am to 4pm.
A circular signed by the head of INEC voter education in the state, Wilfred Ifogah, explained that the rescheduling of the election process for Epie 1 and 3 as well as Gbarain 2 and Okordia became necessary after the process in the above mentioned wards were disrupted.
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