Gov. Fayose Accuse INEC Of Fueling Electoral Crisis

Ekiti State Governor, Mr Ayodele Fayose, has faulted the reasons given by the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, for the renewed electoral violence in the country.

The governor said violence returned to our electoral process because of INEC’s partisanship and manipulation of the electoral process in favour of the All Progressives Congress.

Rather than lamenting, Fayose advised Yakubu to return the electoral commission to what he met by detaching it from the APC, which according to him, INEC had obviously merged with.

In a statement issued on Wednesday, by his Special Assistant on Public Communications and New Media, Lere Olayinka, Fayose said,

“If INEC is neutral as it used to be before APC took power, there won’t be electoral violence.”

“There were elections in Nigeria between 2011 and 2015, and those elections were credible, such that Nigerians were sure that popular candidates and parties would emerge victorious because votes were allowed to count. Then, violence was no longer part of our electoral process. But sadly, this present INEC has destroyed all those gains and returned Nigeria to the era of ballot box snatching.”

He said it was shameful that after casting their votes, votes counted and announced publicly, Nigerians now needed to police their votes to collation centres to prevent figures already entered into relevant INEC forms from being altered.

The governor, who counselled Yakubu to be mindful of his name and purge the electoral commission under him of partisanship and election manipulation, said; there was no way President Muhammadu Buhari would have been elected if INEC, under Prof Attahiru Jega was the way it is now.

He questioned the rationale behind the jettisoning of the system introduced by Jega, in which accreditation of voters was done at the same time in all polling units from 8am to 1pm while voting would commence after the number of accredited voters are known and counting of votes is done at the same time.