Anambra poll: How we protected Soludo's votes - ICT Agency

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By Madu Obi

The Managing Director of Anambra ICT Agency, Mr Chukwuemeka Agbata has revealed how his agency protected the votes of Governor Chukwuma Soludo during the November 8 gubernatorial election in the state.

Governor Soludo, the candidate of All Progressives Grand Alliance, APGA, won all the 21 local government areas and 320 out of the 326 wards in the state, scoring 73% of the total votes.

Speaking with reporters in Awka, Agbata said his agency, as a strong supporter of Governor Soludo, was aware moves by the opposition to manipulate the results from the various collation centers and so applied the technology at its disposal to nip the dubious plan in the bud.

He said: "Anambra runs with the mantra, 'everything technology and technology everywhere', and that mantra is what guides Mr Governor.

"We as an ICT Agency know this, and we also know that election is a very complex thing, so we decided to look for a way that technology can make things better. The idea was to use technology to manage the process, such that Mr Governor and our party people could be aware of what was happening in all the 5,720 polling units in the state.

We also needed a way to ensure that incident reports, results and any other general information was easily captured and we came up with a strategy where we built a two way system command and control centre.

So, we had two situation rooms, one in Isuofia the governor's hometown, and one at the Awka Government House. That way, we were able to police the votes of the governor against theft."

According to him, the agency used two giant screens, adding that while one coordinated the results tracked from polling unit to polling unit, ward to ward and local government to local government, the other screen was dedicated to IREV.

"As INEC was uploading the results, we were also comparing it with what we have on our portal, and also tracking wards where results were yet to be remitted, while our men in the field chased after them to avoid manipulations.

By 4pm that Saturday, we were able to get almost all the results. We were sure the governor would win, but we needed to build a system that could help us protect Mr Governor's votes and also ensure that the margin is wide", Agbata said.

He also spoke on how the agency used technology to drive the aspiration of the Soludo administration.

"Before the election, we conducted a survey, making phone calls to over 200,000 Anambra people, with a set of seven questions, asking where they would vote and why they would vote for any particular candidate. We also incurred over 20 terabytes of data for the election, giving out free WiFi in strategic places and at events.

Our research already had a ready result about the voting pattern, and believe me, some of the results we got tallied to an extent with the eventual outcome. That gave us an insight into the voting pattern and what to expect in the election.

We knew we would win the election, but what we were trying to do was to see a way to guide against voter apathy. Beyond that, we already had all sorts of metrics that showed that the governor would win.

We deployed the Geeks and Founders Alliance for Soludo (GEFAS), mobile tech hub for the election, which went round distributing free WiFi. GEFAS is a support group for the governor, mainly consisting of techies (that is technologically advanced persons), and we used our knowledge of technology to see how we could make the best out of the election," he stated.