Election: Why we can’t have Kenya scenario in Nigeria –INEC chair

By Abdulrahman A. Abdulrauf

Abuja

Chairman, Independent National Electoral Commission, Professor Mahmood Yakubu, yesterday assured that the agency had put in place some checks to forestall the kind of irregularities leading to the cancellation of Kenyan Presidential election. Nevertheless, he admitted that the electoral body had learnt some lessons from both Kenya and Ghana as well as other jurisdictions outside Africa in election management. Th e INEC boss who spoke yesterday at a consultative meeting with media executives in Abuja, also said , overtime it had been established that trust is very crucial in any electoral process. In a historic ruling and fi rst of its kind in Africa, Kenya’s Supreme Court nullifi ed recently the reelection of a sitting President, Uhuru Kenyatta, ordering a new vote to be held within 60 days after fi nding that the outcome of the August poll was tainted by irregularities. Th e victory of the 55-year old Kenyatta was contested by the main opposition leader, Raila Odinga, 72, who petitioned the apex court to nullify the election. Kenyatta had won the poll with 54 percent of the votes, well above the 50 percent threshold to avoid a run-off , while his main challenger polled about 44 percent, a diff erence of about 1.4 million votes. Allaying the possibility of such happening in Nigeria, the INEC chair said, Kenya’s electoral body did not back its position on the disputed result with the manual copy. He said: “Transmission of election results must be backed with paper trail. We have learnt a lot from Kenya and other jurisdictions. We have learnt from the experience of Kenya, we have learnt from the experience of Ghana and others. “Unlike Kenya, Nigeria has gone ahead. When we produce results, the parties have their copies, the security, as well as the commission. In Germany and Norway, you will be surprised that they used manual voting, same elsewhere like France and other advanced democracies. Th e wimple thing they told me is trust”, Yakubu added. On the 2018 governorship elections in both Osun and .
, Yakubu said arrangement had been concluded to release the timetable for the polls on Th ursday, assuring that INEC only wanted to be sure that they did not fall on days with major events as it happened during the Edo polls

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