The N200 billion
given to the Independent National Electoral Commission by the federal
government since 2009, in terms of budgetary and supplementary
budgetary allocations, to enable it prepare credible elections, has
become one huge waste, says a civil society group, International
Society for Civil Liberties and the Rule of Law (Intersociety).
Speaking to NEXT
yesterday in Awka, Anambra State, the chairman of the group, Emeka
Umeagbalasi, said despite the multi-billion naira worth of grants and
development assistance from some foreign donor bodies, INEC still
failed to justify what they got at the tax payers’ expense.
Mr. Umeagbalasi,
while analysing the commission’s handling of the botched polls leading
to the shifting of the entire exercise, observed what he termed as
mounting shortcomings which dwarfed the botched polls’ conduct, apart
from the reported dearth of sensitive electoral materials in many parts
of the country.
“For instance, the
commission failed woefully to adhere strictly to the times fixed by it,
that is to say, time for accreditation (8:a.m. to 12:noon);
thirty-minutes break (12:noon to 12:30p.m.); and voting time (12:30p.m.
downwards).
“From reports
across the country, many INEC’s substantive and ad hoc staffers made it
to the polling centres as late as past 10.a.m. while in some centres no
single staffer of the commission was sighted as at past noon,” Mr.
Umeagbalasi observed.
According to him,
there was no report of any polling centre in Nigeria being empty, which
he said meant that voters’ turn-out was very impressive.
“Even if the
sensitive electoral materials were to be sufficiently available, a good
number of registered voters would have been disenfranchised owing to
the stringent conditions introduced for the voting process and the
magisterial conducts of many staffers of the commission, especially
those that arrived their duty posts very late.
“For instance, a
good number of registered voters were shut out and denied accreditation
once it was past 12noon, on the grounds that accreditation ends by 12
noon, even when it was indisputable that the commission’s staffers in
those polling centres arrived as late as 11:45a.m,” Mr. Umeagbalasi
further stated.
He said the implication was that it was not enough to announce the shifting of the polls and new dates for same.
Rather, what matters is the ability to surmount the man-made
problems inherent in the botched polls in order to lure back the
“disenchanted, insulted, and disappointed and provoked Nigerian voters
who defied all odds to troop out en masse in the country’s 132,000
polling centres,” he said.
