INEC’s chairman is a weak man with no initiative—Presidential Committee chairman

The chairman of the Presidential Advisory Committee Against Corruption has gone all out in attacking INEC’s Chairman Mahmood Yakubu for the way te election management body handled the 2019 elections, and how it is preparing for those of 2023.

Prof. Itse Sagay lunged at Mahmoud as INEC plans to register more political parties ahead of the 2023 general election.

“The current INEC chairman is a very weak man and doesn’t have any initiative,’ Sagay told the Independent.

“He collapses easily under problems and just articulates the problems without any solutions while waiting for somebody else to do it for him.”

According to the law professor, a body like INEC should be proactive.

“When they found that the whole thing was getting out of hand with 91 parties, they should have done something about it,” he said.

Relating his experience in the last multi-party election, Sagay said educated as he is, he found it very difficult to identify the APC logo out of the 73 political parties that contested in the presidential election.

“Now, INEC is talking of 200 and they are just saying it without thinking of what to do about it so that we don’t get to that level.

“For me, it’s all a sign of INEC’s weakness which has been a serious problem particularly in these 2019 elections as against the one in 2015 when we had a chairman of INEC who knew what he was doing.

He suggested the election management body should get their lawyers to draft a document and send it to the Ministry of Justice so that the conditions for registration can be made more drastic.

“At the end, we won’t have more than 10 parties,” he said.