Ahead of the 2023 elections, the Independent National
Electoral Commission (INEC) has rolled out measures to curb vote buying and
increase transparency.
Festus Okoye, INEC’s national commissioner, spoke on the
measures on Tuesday during the citizens elections dialogue hosted by YIAGA
Africa and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in partnership with
Channels TV.
Okoye said the commission is committed to carrying out its
mandate in upholding a transparent and accountable electoral system.
“This commission is focused and determined to give Nigerians a good election. In terms of the issue of vote buying, the commission has reconfigured the various polling units to guarantee the secrecy of the votes,” the national commissioner said.
“In terms of training of ad-hoc staff, we’ve given them very
good training and we’ll continue to train them on how to configure and position
the voting cubicle to guarantee the secrecy of the votes.
“We have also made sure that people do not enter the voting
compartments with their mobile phones that can take pictures and we’re also
collaborating with the different security agencies under the auspices of the
inter-agency consultative committee on election security to make sure that
plain clothe security personnel are deployed to some polling units on election
day to stem the issue of vote buying and vote selling.
“It’s fashionable to grandstand relating to the commitment
of the INEC to free, fair and transparent election. But you should also flip
back and look at some of the party primaries that some of the political parties
conducted and how well they conducted them.
“As far as the commission is concerned, our mandate is to
organise, undertake and supervise elections and that’s exactly what we’re going
to do and that’s what we’re going to continue to do.”
Okoye said the commission made a deliberate effort to
include technology in the electoral process to avoid “human interference”.
“We deliberately decided to include technology in the
electoral process in order to alleviate pernicious human interference in that
process,” he said.
“We’re going to make sure technology is deployed and we’re
also going to make sure that we transmit polling unit results into our INEC
viewing portal.”
Okoye added that the commission will do “whatever it takes
to guarantee free, fair, transparent and inclusive” elections in 2023.
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