HURIWA TO N’ASS; PRESIDENCY-: UNBUNDLE INEC; SACK YAKUBU
MAHMOOD NOW:
* SAYS INEC’S CRIMINAL COLLUSION IN 2019
ELECTIONS HAS COSTS TAX PAYERS OVER N500 BILLION IN LITIGATIONS:
The prominent pro-democracy and civil Rights advocacy group- HUMAN RIGHTS
WRITERS ASSOCIATION OF NIGERIA (HURIWA) has tasked President Muhammadu Buhari
and the National Assembly on the urgent need to fundamentally UNBUNDLE, reform
and reorganize the decadent and incompetent Independent National
Electoral commission (INEC) by sacking the grossly ineffective Chairman Mr.
YAKUBU Mahmood and to pass necessary legislations to insulate the electoral
commission from manipulations of any kind. HURIWA said any further delay in actualizing
comprehensive electoral reforms could lead Nigeria to disintegration should
INEC be left to again compromise the integrity of the coming General elections
in 2023, an election that will make or Mar the Country.
HURIWA made these observations in a media Statement by the National Coordinator
Comrade Emmanuel Onwubiko and the National Media Affairs Director Miss Zainab
Yusuf following a spate of contentious legal matters that have trailed the
conduct of the 2019 general elections just as the Rights group expressed shock
that due to the compromises and criminal collusions of the officials of the
Independent National Electoral Commission the Nigerian tax payers are now
burdened with the unnecessary payments of over N500 billion legal fees and
other expenditures that follow such high profile matters involving mostly state
governors and the President who are known to have dipped their hands into the
coffers of the nation state and their respective states to prosecute the cases
against them from their political rivals.
HURIWA alluded to the involvement in
these cases of mostly wealthy and indeed billionaire lawyers and Senior
Advocates of Nigeria whose professional fees are in several hundreds of
millions of Naira just as the Rights group stated that the litigants enjoying
public funding privileges often deploy publicly owned vehicles and other
paraphernalia of office in the pursuit of these personal cases but which
funding burdens are passed on to the people of Nigeria.
HURIWA has also told President Muhammadu Buhari that as a self-acclaimed
statesman who will inevitably quit office soon at the expiration of his second
and final constitutional tenure in 2023 if the Supreme court rules in his
favour as widely expected in government circles, he is generally expected
to ensure that the electoral system and the electoral institution which are
clearly deficient in many instances and suffer from self-inflicted corrupt
practices, they ought to be adequately fixed, systematically unbundled and fundamentally
reformed so elections in Nigeria will not be characterized by expensive but
avoidable post-election disputes that take away huge resources from the
Nigerian people and create undue panics, distractions and confusions in the
States and the nation as a whole. HURIWA observed further that badly conducted
polls have also often led to bloodshed and conflicts.
HURIWA also faulted the criminal and
illegal practice whereby incumbent governors and the President whose
re-election are bone of contention usually pay off their large retinue of
lawyers and hangers on through the deployment of public funds.
HURIWA told the President and the legislators that this is the time to effect
reforms in the electoral system and that retaining the Chairman of INEC who
misled the nation into the most discredited and disputed national election will
amount to rewarding unprofessional conducts just as the Rights group expressed
the opinion that in saner climes the Chairman of INEC would have been facing
prosecution for a string of allegations of misconduct including the fact that
billions of taxpayers’ money was appropriated for the acquisition of
technologies including servers for the smooth conduct of the 2019 polls only
for the same commission to tell the Presidential election Petition Tribunal
(PEPT) that INEC does not have servers.
“Nigerians by now should be asking INEC chairman to explain how the commission under him collected allocations in the guise of buying computers and technologies for electronic voting’s including servers only for the same commission to now deny ever deploying servers. Why is nobody asking INEC to render proper accounts and publish the audited accounts of INEC?”
HURIWA also cited examples of the
many litigation from the North West and North Central trailing the conducts of
the election to demonstrate that too many things were fundamentally wrong with
INEC and the 2019 polls given that in previous elections the North usually
witness the least number of post-election litigation. The Rights group
said Kano; Bauchi; Kaduna; Sokoto were never known for too many post-election
cases but because the current leadership of INEC conducted the worst election
in the history of Nigeria in the recently ended polls, Nigerians have now seen
an avalanche of cases from places in the North whereby there used to be fewer
or even zero post-election cases.
HURIWA recalled that in Kano the Governorship Election Petition
Tribunal sitting in Kano has reserved judgment just as the People’s Democratic
Party (PDP) and its governorship candidate, Abba Kabir Yusuf, had filed a
petition challenging the victory of Governor Abdullahi Umar Ganduje. The
three-man tribunal, led by Justice Halima S. Muhammad, said it would
communicate the date to the parties affected once it is fixed.
HURIWA recalled that in Sokoto, the opposition APC and its
candidate, Alhaji Ahmed Aliyu, filed a petition against Governor Aminu Waziri
Tambuwal of the PDP. In Plateau state, the Rights group recalled that the
Governorship Election Petition Tribunal sitting in Jos, on August 22, said it
reserved judgment in the petition filed by Jeremiah Useni of the PDP against
Governor Simon Lalong of the APC, after all the parties involved adopted their
final written addresses. In Bauchi state HURIWA recalled that the
immediate past Governor Muhammed Abdullahi Abukakar of the APC petitioned the
victory of Governor Mohammed Bala Abdulkadir of the PDP.
The Rights group said petition has also generated bad blood amongst the people of Bauchi state just as the state has become polarized alongside political camps due to the protracted post-election case created by the poor conduct of 2019 polls by INEC.
HURIWA stated that in Imo, Abia, Oyo; Ekiti: as well as in and Rivers State and all the States of the federation whereby election took place in 2019, politicians are at each other’s throats even as their states are witnessing unprecedented tensions.
HURIWA said there is the need for elections to be well conducted so the judiciary is not seen to be the ultimate arbiters that awards victories to politicians who constitutionally ought to obtain legitimate mandates from the people through electoral process of one person one vote.
