Fayose insists INEC under Prof Yakubu is part of APC
Governor Ayodele Fayose of Ekiti state has again has faulted the chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Professor Mahmood Yakubu on reasons for the renewed electoral violence in the country.
Fayose insisted that violence returned to Nigeria’s electoral process because of INEC’s partisanship and manipulation of the electoral process in favour of the All Progressives Congress (APC).
“Rather than lamenting, the INEC chairman should return the electoral commission to what he met by detaching it from the APC, which INEC has obviously merged with.
“If INEC is neutral as it used to be before APC took power, there won’t be electoral violence,” he said in a statement issued on Wednesday, December 21, 2016 by his special assistant on public communications and new media, Lere Olayinka.
Governor Fayose stressed: “There were elections in Nigeria between 2011 and 2015, and those elections were credible, such that Nigerians were sure that popular candidates and parties would emerge victorious because votes were allowed to count.
“Then, violence was no longer part of our electoral process. But sadly, this present INEC has destroyed all those gains and returned Nigeria to the era of ballot box snatching.”
According to the governor, it is shameful that after casting their votes and it is counted and announced publicly, Nigerians would again need to police the said results to collation centres to prevent figures already entered into relevant INEC forms from being altered.
He counselled Professor Mahmood Yakubu to be mindful of his name and purge the electoral commission under him of partisanship and election manipulation, adding that there was no way President Muhammadu Buhari would have been elected if INEC, under Prof Attahiru Jega was the way it is now.
He queried the rationale behind jettisoning the system introduced by Prof Jega, in which accreditation of voters is done at the same time in all polling units from 8 am to 1 pm while voting would commence after the number of accredited voters are known and counting of votes is done at the same time.
“By returning to the old system of accreditation and voting at the same time, and destroying the credibility of our electoral process, such that unpopular candidates are now having edge over and above those acceptable to the people, INEC by itself caused the electoral violence witnessed in the last 12 months.
“Even judges that will sit on election matters are now pre-arranged and picked even before the election, such that after using INEC and security agencies to pervert the will of the people, tribunals are used to authenticate the electoral fraud.
“The reality therefore is that only INEC can put an end to electoral violence and the only way to do it is for the commission to be neutral,” he said.
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