Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Professor Mahmood Yakubu, has said the commission would not compromise on the quality of elections simply because it wanted to conclude it.
This is also as he further assured stakeholders in the electoral process that the commission was committed to ensuring elections met international best standards.
The INEC chairman was quoted to have said that the commission would not hesitate to cancel elections wherever there are threats to the lives of its officials.
According to INEC bulletin, Yakubu made the assertion during a consultative forum with Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) and the media to address issues around the recently conducted elections by the commission with special focus on the Bayelsa State governorship election, held at the commission’s headquarters in Abuja.
“No electoral body will like to go through a repeat of one election or the other. We will like to conclude all the elections on first ballot. Our principal responsibility is to conduct credible elections, not just elections by any means. We have to conclude elections according to the laws,” he said.
Yakubu further explained on the cancelled Southern Ijaw Local Government election: “Where there are threats to the lives of our officials, we wouldn’t mind applying the law that states that where that is feasible and it has made it impossible for elections to hold, we should cancel the election and re-run same another day. And that was the decision we took. We believe that our principal responsibility as a Commission is to protect the lives of our staff, ad hoc or permanent and also the election material.”
The INEC Chairman spoke on the resolutions reached at the meeting with the Inter-Agency Consultative Committee on Election Security (ICCES), the political parties and contestants in the Bayelsa governorship election.
“Both the Security and Political Parties agreed that the election in Southern Ijaw which was cancelled due to reasons that the Commission made public will now come up on the 9th of January. Reason is that we also need to do some planning for the Southern Ijaw election. Remember, all our secret materials have been exposed and we cannot use the materials already committed for the last election,” he said.
He also disclosed that the Political Parties in Bayelsa reaffirmed their commitment to Bayelsa Peace Accord which was earlier signed by all contestants.
“We agreed that having realized the difficulty with the Southern Ijaw terrain, materials should be delivered directly to the Registration Areas instead of the Local government headquarters”.
On election security, the INEC chairman said: “The lead agency for election security because it is a civil duty is the Nigerian Police. Where they need to call for support from any other security agency, the Police are at liberty to do so”.
On the Smart Card Readers’ functionality, he explained that the Commission had experienced challenges with only one out of the three functions of the card reader, namely: the biometric identification.
He, however, pointed out that “if a Card Reader fails to authenticate a voter, that voter is not disenfranchised, the voter is issued an incident form and is allowed to vote after filling it.”
