INEC Says Bode George Lied on Claim That Ex-Lagos Commissioner is Head of its ICT

The Independent National Electoral Commission, Tuesday night, punctured the soaring claim that a former Commissioner in Lagos State, Mr. Femi Odubiyi, is its head of the Information and Communications Technology department, ICT.

The statement by the electoral umpire is a direct response to a claim by a former Deputy National Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Chief Bode George, that the former commissioner was INEC’s  head of ICT.

Based on the claim, Chief George demanded, on Sunday, that INEC Chairman, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, must remove Odubiyi as the Commission’s ICT head with immediate effect because of his alleged closeness to the then presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress, APC, now President-elect, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu.

Before giving the selfsame Odubiyi the boot, however, George said  Prof. Yakubu, owed Nigerians an urgent explanation as to how the same former Commissioner for Science and Technology in Lagos State allegedly found his way into INEC’s nominal roll as head of ICT, “a critical department before, during and after elections.”

But dismissing the story, the Commission, through its National Commissioner and Chairman, Information and Voter Education Committee, Barrister Festus Okoye, said the viral report attributed to Chief Bode George was a fallacy.

“Nothing can be farther from the truth,” Okoye wrote in the commission’s rebuttal. “To set the record straight, the name “Femi Odubiyi“  does not even exist within our ICT Department at the INEC headquarters in Abuja or any state office of the Commission.”

Okoye said all the staff of the ICT Department were career officers of the Commission, and “none has held any political appointment in any state of the Federation.”

He, therefore, urged the public to disregard the story even as he maintained that “the promoter should have been circumspect so as not to be seen as a purveyor of fake news.”