INEC too slow to conduct credible elections, says Don

The Director, Centre for International Advanced and Professional Studies, Prof. Anthony Kila, says the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, is too slow and confused to conduct a credible election in Nigeria.

Kila, who delivered a lead paper at the quarterly Forum of the Association of Political Consultants-Africa, APC, in Ikeja, with the theme: ‘2019 Presidential Elections Predictions: A Post Mortem,’ held in Ikeja, Lagos, Southwest Nigeria, said INEC needed to be overhauled.

He said modern technology should be employed to get results rather than people queuing and waiting for days for INEC to manually announce results of elections, adding that the electoral body must be overhauled for credible elections in the future.

“There is a way to handle Nigerian elections and get results immediately when you vote, it is possible. The process of collecting PVCs is outdated. It should be outsourced to the banks. PVCs should be connected with BVN,” he said.

 According to Kila, INEC should be worried about the poor turnout of voters during the election and that the voting pattern remained unchanged from what it was in 2015, saying that political analysts predicted rightly that Buhari would win the election.

Speaking at the event, Kehinde Bamigbetan, President, APC Africa, stated that the lesson from the 2019 election was that Nigerian voters were becoming more enlightened and casting their votes in that direction.

Curtis Atigba, one of the political consultants to the All Progressives Congress, APC, said the party created four pathways for victory for Buhari, with the sole aim to win 70 percent of the votes in the North West, saying that “we predicted that we will win the entire North East with the exception of Adamawa. We stuck with the poor while Atiku’s campaign stuck with the rich.”

“Our ambition was to win 24 States plus the Federal Capital Territory. The North Central had security challenges but their governors are owing salaries seriously and we leverage on that and we made a big issue on the character of the candidate contending with us,” he said.

Atigba said the surprise for the APC was the South West where the election was seriously contended during anti-parties activities.