A group of observers who participated in the just-concluded 2019 general elections have lamented the lack of credible politician in Nigeria.
The observers, Women Advocates Research and Documentation Centre, WARDC, Transition Monitoring Group, Human and Environmental Development Agenda and Election Observation Platform, in a report jointly put together and presented in Abuja on Thursday, noted that political parties have shown they were incapable of providing candidates worthy of being elected by the people based on their credibility.
They described the last elections as a big retrogression insisting it had taken the nation back to 2007 and beyond.
Speaking at a post – 2019 election briefing in Abuja, the Executive Director of WARDC and Chairperson of TMG, Dr. Abiola Akiyode-Afolabi, also decried the level of vote buying and selling during the elections concluding that the political space in the country was for sale.
Her words: “From our assessment, the general electioneering process for 2019 is a big retrogression from where we are coming from. It has brought us back not only to 2007, but to past elections where Nigeria had no laws or institutions. But we are supposed to have got over that; so it is so much of a concern. At a point, the Independent National Electoral Commission became helpless and it couldn’t also respond or understand how it got to some instances.
“We got to a situation in the last election where electoral officers were being shot, hijacked and held hostage. I don’t think in our electoral history, we have got to that level where electoral officers cannot declare results without interference by either political thugs, security officers or any other people who feel that they can influence elections.
“How come nobody is talking about these happenings? The professors who were the Returning Officers are not coming out boldly to talk about it, so we need a public hearing; people must be able to talk about what happened in this election for us to be able to avoid a repeat of such. We have people who won elections with votes that are less that 25 per cent of the total registered voters. This is not the kind of democracy we want to see.”
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On the issue of vote-buying and voter inducement that characterised the elections, Akiyode-Afolabi noted that such would destroy the nation’s democracy if not curbed.
“It is obvious that vote-buying and other forms of voters’ inducements are gradually becoming the bane of our democracy in Nigeria. Voters are being disempowered to give their votes in exchange for money and other material needs. In the 2019 elections, the electorate merely lost their voting power, which distorted the entire concept of free and fair elections. Political victory was on sale in broad daylight.
“Political parties in this country have shown that they are incapable of providing candidates that are worthy of being elected and can be elected by the people based on their credibility.
“Nigeria is faced with more challenges with the outcome of this election than what we can imagine. The democratic space is definitely on sale. Democracy should naturally come with some freedom for people to choose other forms of discrimination and when inducements come in, the entire process has been defeated.
“We are demanding a general audit and the audit is important because it will help us to understand what went wrong. The audit will help us to get a holistic and comprehensive understanding of what went wrong.”
