Technical Glitch Excuses: Do They Address Victims' Losses?

All too often, we hear the excuses of technical glitches as the reasons for dysfunctional systems. However, we hardly hear about remedial measures in favour of the victims of technical glitches in especially competitive or business settings where these victims count their losses or lick their wounds alone.

What is so wrong with being proactive and anticipatory about the unpredictable onset of glitches and making provisions that will assuage the pains of the victims of these technical glitches? 

Given the fact that both the beneficiaries and the non-beneficiaries of unforeseen circumstances commit equal stakes, it is only fair to seek ways to balance things out for the latter when the otherwise becomes the case.

For example, a typical case in hand is the recently concluded Presidential and National Assembly elections during which the delays in uploading the election results were attributed to technical glitches by the election umpire, INEC.

In breaking their silence on the election result collation process following the February 25 Presidential and National Assembly elections across the country, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) blamed the delays and malfunctions on technical glitches.

INEC failed to mention whether the glitches are man-made or otherwise.

According to the Commission, the delay experienced in the collation of results was caused as a result of the inability of some ad-hoc staff to work up to speed in transmitting the collated results to the INEC viewing center. 

INEC’s National Commissioner, Festus Okoye, disclosed this on Sunday while fielding questions on Channels Television’s The 2023 Verdict.

"We conducted this election in 176,848 units across all the States of the federation.

"It’s the responsibility of the Presiding Officers (POs) and the Registration Area (RA) technical support staff to assist and make sure these results are uploaded into our INEC result viewing centers.

“Some of them (Ad-hoc staff) are not uploading the results with the speed we expected them to upload the results.

"So, our IT support staff have been contacting most of them to make sure they do the right and upload these results in real-time for Nigerians to have confidence and see these results as they are coming in.”