Lai Mohammed, minister of
information and culture, says the 2019 elections will probably be the least
expensive elections for the All Progressives Congress (APC).
Lai told TheCable that his party
has performed and would go on to win the elections without having to spend so
much.
Speaking on how the APC intends
to fund the 2019 national elections, and control how much other parties in the
country spend on elections, the minister said it is the responsibility of the
Independent National Electoral
Commission (INEC) to monitor campaign expenditurespending.
“INEC is the statutory body
saddled with the responsibility of monitoring campaign expenditure, but one
thing I can assure you is that for us, 2019 election will probably be the least
expensive for us, because we have performed, we have delivered,” he said.
“Just talking to you now, we feed
8.2 million pupils everyday, one free meal a day, they have parents. I just
told you what we’ve done in infrastructure.
“I was about to tell you what we
have achieved in tackling insecurity. When we came in in 2015, 20 out of 27
local governments in Borno state alone were under the influence of Boko Haram,
today not a single local government in the entire northeast.”
Elections in Nigeria are reckoned
to be one of the most expensive in the world by both national and international
researchers and commentators.
A research published in the
Journal for African Elections revealed that the 2011 elections cost over N566
billion, more than two percent of the country’s gross domestic product.
Daily Trust estimates that
elections expenditure in Nigeria has grown from a little over N1 billion in
1999 to over N100 billion in 2015, surpassing the cost of election in India, the
world’s largest democracy.
Bolade Eyinla, chief technical
adviser to the INEC chairman, had said the 2015 elections had a core cost of
$547 million and a total cost of about $1.5 billion to $2 billion.
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