Dr. Dickson Ariaga, Used By INEC To Announced The Presidential Election Results In Rivers State Is Unknown To The Federal College Of Education, Omoku, As Claimed By Him

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The February, 2023 Presidential Election in Nigeria has come and gone but the dust raised are yet to settle.

The British Broadcasting Corperation{BBC} in there efforts to unravel some of the mysteries noticed during the election, have come out with some astonishing revelations.

According to their report, they stated thus:

“We 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 our own 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 our 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.

According to the BBC, “we asked the electoral commission if we could speak to Dr Ariaga, but they would not give us his details or reach out to him for us. We spoke to the election official seated next to Dr Ariaga, but she told us she wasn’t authorised to talk to the press.

“So we sent a reporter to the Federal College of Education in Omoku, about two hours drive north of Port Harcourt, where he’d 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.”

“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.”

“We put these findings to Nigeria’s Independent National Electoral Commission (Inec). Johnson Sinikiem, INEC’s regional spokesman in Port Harcourt, told us 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.”

“We also approached INEC’s headquarters in Abuja for a response to our findings of discrepancies in the results in Rivers State. We 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. On their own, these altered results would not have decisively swayed the outcome of the presidential election. Bola Tinubu won the national presidential vote by 1.8m votes over his nearest rival, Atiku Abubakar of the PDP.

“We’re still looking for Dr Ariaga to respond to the findings in this report.”