…Ganduje blames politicians, absorbs INEC of election violence
From Romanus Ugwu, Abuja
Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has admitted that multiplicity of factors contributed in its failure to perform its statutory constitutional responsibility of conducting the verification of the status of political parties in the country.
Speaking during the verification exercise at the headquarters of the ruling party on Wednesday, Hawa Habibu, Director Election and Party Monitoring, confessed that the commission conducted the last verification in 2019.
She further disclosed that it failed to conduct the verification in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic, just as she noted that multiple activities in year 2021 and 2022 stopped the commission from carrying out the exercise.
Addressing members of APC National Working Committee (NWC), she said: “We are here on an annual verification of political parties. It is a constitutional mandate of the commission. Basically, we are supposed to find out and issue notices where political parties are not in compliance with the constitutional provisions as to the number, structure of the party in terms of the office in Abuja, auditing of their finances and other issues.
“The team will go round to verify the offices with our forms to give us the structure of the party as to whether the Electoral Act provision of minimum of 24 members of different states of the federation and the FCT has been compiled with. We will also find out whether APC has given us its audited over the years.
“The last time we had this verification was in 2019, there was COVID-19 in 2020, we had so much activities in 2021 and 2022 and it has become pertinent that we have to do so now to verify political parties to ensure that the compliance status are in order. These are basically our assignments,” she said.
Earlier, APC National Secretary, Ajibola Bashiru, had told the commission that the ruling party has no ghost leadership, confirming that all the items required for the exercise have been prepared.
“The requisite document required for the verification exercise have been duly prepared by the secretariat of the party. The copies will be handed over to them. It is important for them to verify that we don’t have ghost leadership in our party.
“The papers that have to do with title documents with our account statement and how we applied the funds in line with the requirement of the Constitution have also been prepared with the details of our staffing and the schedule,” he said.
In his speech, APC National Chairman, Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, absorbed the commission of any complicity in the electoral violence experienced in the conduct of elections, admitting that politicians are the biggest culprits.
Hear him: “I know one of the biggest problem of INEC, in conducting elections is insecurity. Everyone will say INEC, but it’s the politicians. So, in order to understand the rules and regulations of election, in order to understand what is require to be a civilised politicians, our institutions will be educating our people from time to time so that they can abide by the rules and regulations and it will be going digital.
And without the cooperation of our politicians that can be bastardized.”
On the measures the ruling party is making to make the conduct of elections more efficient, Ganduje said: “I want to assure you that our party is a strong party. We are ready to provide all the information require. We want to make our party a very strong institution as require by law development to democracy. Therefore, we have decided to make our party active throughout the year not only during election periods.
“We have also directed that all our party offices ranging from ward, local government, zone, and states, basically the officers must be available. And operationally, the office must be functioning so that we are existing in terms of physical and functional.
“Also, we have decided to make our party an ICT party. We have directed for e registration of our members and we believe that will help us to partner with INEC to enable democracy. This we help us in planning, identify numbers, sex and age bracket in our party, qualification, profession of our party members, identity of our members right from ward level, local government level, state level to national level.
“We do that to improve the democratic principles in the party
We are developing what we called National Institute for Progressive studies in order to teach our members the ethics of democracy so that the issue of hate speeches will be eliminated. Fragile issue will be eliminated,” he stated.