Vote Buying: Why we’ve not charged those arrested in Anambra to court – INEC

… says poor telecommunication service hinder speedy upload of results

The Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, Prof. Joash Amupitan, SAN, on Thursday, gave reasons why those that were arrested for engaging in vote-buying during the recent governorship election in Anambra state, have not been charged to court.

According to him, whereas the INEC is statutorily empowered to prosecute electoral offenders, however, security agencies that carried out the arrests have not submitted their investigation reports to the Commission.

Amupitan, SAN, who made the revelation at a Stakeholders’ Forum on Elections, organised by the Nigeria Civil Society Situation Room, said the electoral body have been liaising with the relevant agencies to secure the reports.

He said: “I am happy to know that you are aware that some people were arrested, and people are saying, what have you done?

“We are reaching to the police. We are reaching to EFCC. We are reaching to all the other agencies. We will need reports on the investigations conducted in respect of those people that were arrested.

“Because the power of INEC is to prosecute, not to arrest. We don’t have that capacity for now.

“We are liaising with the law engineering agencies to ensure that those that were arrested will have their day in court.”

The INEC boss maintained that to secure democracy, technological integrity must be matched by political accountability.

“We recognise that vote-buying and financial inducement derail the will of the people. To combat this, we have intensified our collaboration with law enforcement agencies through the Inter-Agency Consultative Committee on Election Security (ICCES).

“The strategic deployment of security personnel and covert intelligence operations at election centres is designed to protect voters from intimidation and resist inducement.

“This is a multi-sectoral fight that requires collective resolve. Civil Society Organisations must play their part decisively to hold all stakeholders, including political parties, to account,” he added.

He decried that poor telecommunication network remained INEC’s “formidable obstacle” in its effort to achieve real-time upload of election results from the 176, 000 polling polling units in the country, some of which are located in remote areas.

“Achieving real-time upload of results to IREV remains one of our toughest operational battles. As I have stated above, a tool like BVAS is only as good as the network it runs.

“We are therefore committed to continuous engagement with the Nigerian Communication Commission, NCC, and the network providers, while actively exploring the alternative technologies, improving on the existing one, and building a system.

“I am building system redundancy to bridge these gaps. I want to share about our experience in Anambra. Before the Anambra election, we had a mock accreditation and the essence of the mock accreditation was to test technology, because whether we like it or not, in whatever electoral process, technology plays a very, very important role.

“Now, some people were on the field, and we picked out some polling units in some local governments, and we were in the situation room as this, monitoring what was happening.

“So, they were doing accreditation on the field, in particular polling units. We noticed that the presiding officer would tell us that they have accredited 20, but you are still seeing 11. So, we were working on a situation where, as you were doing the accreditation, automatically the BVAS would upload.

“Now, some were working well, others were not working well. We now had to interrogate. Number one, we discovered that one of the presiding officers, the network was bad in that area. It was what’s epileptic. So, it was not uploading as they were accrediting and in another place, we discovered that a presiding officer we had even trained for the election, could not upload.

“So, we just had to find a way, trying to test just to be sure that on the election day, we do not have such an issue. It is important to note that in as much as there is technology, our infrastructure are still not 100% the way we desire it. We rely on service providers, secondary service providers.

“We are looking forward to when INEC will, on its own, be able to have its own services, so that you don’t even need to rely on anybody.

“Somebody told me, on the day of election, what if a powerful politician just decide to ask one of the service provider to switch off its services, just for one day. So, do we have control over it?

“In as much as we desire, we are going to do everything to improve on what we find on ground.

“But those are some of the challenges which we have to bring to fore. Even with technology, we must collectively confront persistent low turnout that threatens the very legitimacy of our democracy.”

While emphasizing the need for a thorough clean up of the existing voters register, Amupitan said the Commission has recorded a nationwide total of 2,685,725 fresh registration of voters.

“Of this figure, 1,576,137 individuals completed the online pre-registration, while 1,109,588 finalised their registration through physical capture. This mobilisation is a testament to the rising political awareness, and we commend the states leading the charge: Osun State firmly maintains its lead with 208,357 registered voters. It is closely followed by Kano (159,669), Sokoto (152,650), and Imo (145,561).

“States like Borno (123,835) and Lagos (123,484) also reflect this impressive mobilisation of citizens,” he added.

In his remarks, the Executive Director of Policy & Legal Advocacy Center, PLAC, Mr. Clement Nwankwo, cautioned against what he described as the shrinking of political spaces in the country, warning that “our political parties are dying.”

“We must have plurality in this country,” Nwankwo added, insisting the current movement of politicians into one political party, ahead of the 2027 general elections, was not in the best interest of the nation.(Vanguard)