AS the nation prepares for the 2019 elections, citizens and organisations have become popular targets of advice. For example, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has repeated its advice to citizens to collect their Permanent Voter Cards (PVCs), without which they cannot vote. This advice is in order. Citizens should not leave electoral choice to only citizens who choose to sacrifice time and energy to collect their PVCs.

We also urge INEC to ensure that all those who registered for PVCs get them, even if it means extending the time for collection. In the same vein, citizens who registered must ensure they go to the required places to collect their PVCs.

More importantly, however, is the warning by the Director-General of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC),  Brigadier-General Suleiman Kazaure, to corps members recruited as temporary electoral officials to shun any electoral misconduct in the forthcoming national and sub-national elections. Brigadier-General  Kazaure emphasised the importance of probity for NYSC members called upon to serve the nation as electoral officials: “The NYSC would not undermine the goodwill it has built over the years through the misconduct of corps members … The welfare and security of all corps members remain the priority of the management of the scheme.”

This is an advice well given. It is necessary for NYSC to stress that its members’ safety and welfare while serving as electoral officials are the responsibility of the electoral commission, the Federal Government and the security agencies. NYSC members had been involved in the conduct of elections since 2011, in the first presidential election between General Muhammadu Buhari and Dr. Goodluck Jonathan.

Some of the members who assisted INEC then got killed during the disturbances that followed the election results in some parts of the North. There were reported cases of some NYSC members running away with election materials in 2015 in some southern states. It is, therefore, proper for the director-general to warn those under his charge about the need for vigilance and good conduct.

Given reports of electoral malpractices since NYSC members’ participation in elections, the bulk of negative reports about electoral misconduct and violence before and during elections had been about politicians and their supporters who see election as a “do-or-die” affair. More negative reports of electoral misconduct have also been about full-time INEC members rather than ad-hoc NYSC members. However, it is reassuring that President Buhari is calling stridently for free, fair, and violence-free elections.

As ad-hoc electoral staff are the weakest link in the electoral chain, NYSC members need to be fully protected from politicians given to unwholesome conduct, and their irrational supporters ready to suborn and intimidate electoral officials. INEC should ensure that NYSC members are properly accommodated and adequately protected before and during the elections. It is risky to house them in school buildings that can be easily infiltrated by desperate politicians without scruples. Further, security men in charge of elections ought to be as straight as arrow in the performance of their duty as we have also seen cases where some unscrupulous security agents constitute a threat to free, fair, and peaceful elections, as well as to the young men and women on loan from theNYSC.

But it is necessary for NYSC members on electoral duty to remember that, like other electoral officers, they are liable to be punished for any electoral infractions. More importantly, all law and order agents in charge of elections, as well as INEC officials in all polling booths should provide the right model of conduct for the NYSC members, by showing without fail that they are friends of  democracy and fair elections and not of any party or candidate.
http://thenationonlineng.net/good-warning-by-nysc/

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