INEC’s Constant Assurances

                                         POLITICAL NOTES

Any time they have the opportunity to speak on the issue, the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Professor Mahmood Yakubu and the commission’s Commissioner for Information and Voter Education, Dr. Festus Okoye, will always reassure Nigerians that the general election would hold as scheduled.

While Yakubu again gave the reassurance at the Chatham House in London recently, Okoye did this at the 20th Daily Trust Dialogue in Abuja last week.

The assurances came amid fears that the conduct of the elections would be imperiled in view of the present socioeconomic and political environment in the country characterised by insecurity, fuel scarcity and the new Naira redesign policy of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).

The commission just needs to prepare very well for this election. Afterall, it has demonstrated that it recognised the fact that security is a huge challenge and a huge concern both to election workers, and to the Nigerian people.

All it needs to do is to consult more almost on a daily basis with the various security agencies in relation to the security of the workers it will deploy for the elections and also the security of the voters.

At this juncture, there is nothing Nigerians are demanding from the commission other than to fulfill its commitment to conduct free, fair, transparent, verifiable and inclusive elections on the dates they were scheduled.

Nigerians can still recall that barely five hours to the presidential and National Assembly elections in 2019, INEC announced postponement of the exercise, blaming the development on logistics issues.

President Muhammadu Buhari who was angry over the disappointment had seriously wondered the incompetence of the commission over the postponement, despite the huge resources made available to it to prosecute the polls.

Buhari had reportedly stated that had all the resources needed by the commission to carry out its duties not been released to it, it would have used that as an excuse for its failure.

“I have to leave my constituency and come to Abuja immediately, because I was told of the decision of INEC about 4:30 in the morning. I told them in my statement at the airport that INEC had all the time and all the resources they wanted and then they had to wait for only six hours to cast the votes to tell us that it is not possible. Definitely, the reasons why such incompetence manifests itself has to be explained to the nation,” he reportedly said.

Nigerians would not accept any excuse in the forthcoming elections.