The Chairman of the Nigeria Bar
Association (NBA) Electoral Monitoring
Committee, Dafe Akpedeye (SAN) has
praised the new tactics employed by the
Independent Electoral Commission
(INEC) in ensuring a hitch-free election.
Speaking to Channels Television in Awka,
Akpedeye said: “INEC keeps tweaking
things and try to get them better. One of
the challenges we have had is the issue
of ballot snatching” adding that “you
could snatch a ballot box and take it to
another unit and it could go back”.
He further noted that “what INEC has
done is that they tied each ballot box to
a particular polling unit, so if you took a
ballot box away, the chance of you
getting it back to that polling unit is next
to nothing and that is why you haven’t
seen any issue of ballot box snatching
today”.
He also noted that about 700, 000
persons were tweaked out of the voter
register because they “didn’t do their due
process” thereby pruning the number of
voters from 2.4 million to 1.7 million.
Akpedeye further noted that “INEC keeps
thinking of better ways of doing things”
insisting that “the challenges are still
there”.
He however berated the late arrival of
voting materials to the polling units
saying; “I would have thought we would
be able to seamlessly deliver voting
materials for the voters latest by 9AM”.
He noted that the bad state of the roads
made traveling from one spot to the other
took quite more than normal.
Money Exchanging Hands
An election observer, Festus Okoye,
confirmed that there was an exchange of
money between the voters and
representatives of the candidates.
He however noted that those who
collected the money claimed they were
getting back their money.
“The money belongs to us (voters) so we
are going to collect it and still vote in
accordance with pure conscience,” the
voters were quoted as saying..
Okoye praised the attitude of INEC
officials and voters in the polling unit he
monitored but maintained that “there are
operational and logistics challenges that
INEC must overcome”.