The Convener of Situation Room, Clement Nwankwo says the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) should partner the National Security Adviser in order to handle election security.
Nwankwo said this on Thursday during an interview on Channels Television’s breakfast programme, Sunrise Daily.
He noted that it is the duty of the electoral body to provide security during elections.
“INEC hearing with the National Security Adviser are supposed to work to deal with security around elections. We had said from the beginning that we would like civil societies to even observe and contribute to suggestions.
“When you look at Section 29 (2) of the Electoral Act is very clear that INEC is in charge of security for the elections and gives directives to the security services on what to do,” he said.
He added that the Inspector General of Police (IGP) Mohammed Adamu collaborated with the electoral body during the 2019 election, this according to him helped in cutting the excesses of police officers during the election.
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“When we meet with the IGP, we were very impressed with his commitment to pulling back to some of our observations we had about the excesses of the police.
“I believe that the new Inspector General of Police did a lot to get the police to become very compliant to some of the duties that are provided for it under the law.
“We are not so sure this was the case across all of the security services. At that point, we made it very clear that you needed to be sure people understand that this is an election to be run by INEC,” he said.
Nwankwo’s comments come two days after he said 2019 general elections in Nigeria failed to meet the “threshold for free, fair and credible elections.”
The civil society organisation, which was one of the accredited election monitors, said this while presenting its report on the 2019 elections.
Despite the revelation, he, however, promised to work with the electoral body to build confidence in the electorates.
He said: “We will continue to work to build people’s confidence in INEC. I think there were challenges with the elections, we have outlined it.
“We do know that INEC has also acknowledged that there are challenges. I think the question here is the approach in beginning to understand how to work towards redressing these challenges. And we are quite prepared to work with INEC to begin to address these challenges.”
