INEC urged to tackle vote-buying during elections

National Chairman, Independent National Electoral Commission, Professor Mahmoud Yakubu has been charged to look into the issue of vote-buying during elections to forestall the act from destroying the country’s democracy.
A leading aspirant for Kogi Central senatorial seat under the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party, Hon.
Abdulkarim Saliu, gave the charge while sub- mitting his nomination form at the PDP state secretariat in Lo- koja.
Saliu said the recent conduct of the governorship election in Ekiti state was a pointer to the fact that the electoral umpire needed to wake up to its respon- sibility of discouraging vote buy- ing in order to protect democracy and give credence to the country’s electoral process.
According to him, “What hap- pened in Ekiti during the gover- norship election is enough signal that our democracy is nose-diving and requires urgent measures to nip it in the bud so that such act will not take the centre stage in our country’s democracy.
“If the major agenda of the federal government is to fight corruption, then buying votes should be seen as an act of corruption which should be dealt with before it collapses the hard earned democracy.
“Vote buying is one of the major challenges that will affect the integrity of 2019 elections as it will not allow the electorate to support and vote for the candi- dates of their choice.
“If this is not discouraged, elections in Nigeria will lose its credibility and where there is no credibility in an election, the de- sired dividends of democracy will definitely elude the people as the politicians would only gear their effort towards recovering the money spent,” he said.
The senate hopeful, who berated the ruling APC for attacking and preventing the opposition from organising activities in the state, noted that democracy cannot thrive where there is no strong and virile opposition to checkmate the activities of the ruling party