The Director of Policy and Legal Advocacy Centre, Clement Nwankwo, has said that the controversy trailing the Anambra governorship election does not reflect preparedness on the part of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), especially in light of the 2015 general elections.
Mr Nwankwo, who was part of the 50 civil society groups deployed to different parts of the state, to monitor the election process, expressed displeasure at the election process and stated that the problems encountered in Anambra reveals that INEC needs to go back to the drawing board.
“INEC has again displayed a huge inability to deal with the challenges that we had observed from several elections that have been held in this country since 2011,” he said, while speaking on Sunrise Daily.
He said that “with what happened in Anambra, we really cannot say we are ready for elections in 2015. Indeed, we need to go back to the drawing board.”
Contrary to reports that there was huge turn-out of voters, Mr Nwankwo said majority of the polling units had low voter turn-out.
“In most of the polling units there were less than 20percent turn-out,and in Ogbaru local government which had the highest registered voters of 139,000 only about 32,000 actually voted.”
He also said it is INECs responsibility to tackle issues of logistics but materials were not available on time including in Awka, where the office is situated.
Nwankwo who complained that there were inadequately trained election officers, also disclosed that, “officials were not deployed on time in several polling units across the state.”
Another major problem, was that of voters not finding their names in the register, especially in Idemili local government. “A lot of voters whose names started with letters U, N and O could not find their names on the register.”
Political parties also contributed to the problems as “political parties were openly sharing money in polling units.”
According to him, “there were no preparations to deal with the fact that election offences can be committed at polling units.”
“There must be a system where an election offender can be apprehended at the poling unit. The security officers should have been trained and facilities provided to that effect.”
“This is unacceptable,” he said.
