INEC Proposes Review of Electoral Act
Amina Zakari
Onyebuchi Ezigbo in Abuja
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has said that it is working with the National Assembly to effect a review of the country’s Electoral Act in order to ensure improvement in the electoral system.
The acting Chairman of INEC, Hajia Amina Zakari, made the statement when she received some Foreign Defence Attaches with the Defence Intelligence Agency at the commission’s headquarters in Abuja.
Zakari said the commission had in the cause of carrying out the commission’s assignment, discovered some lacuna in the electoral act clauses which according to her needed some legal review.
She said INEC has reminded members of the National Assembly, on the need to urgently review those clauses to improve the electoral processes.
``We will continuously try to improve the electoral process through legal reviews. `Election laws are not static, they are dynamic. You have to keep on improving on them especially when something comes up, like the issue of diaspora voting, the issue of electronic voting. These are issues that require review and we will keep on recommending to the national assembly for these reviews,” Zakari said.
Zakari also listed other challenges confronting the commission in carrying out its functions to include election violence, lack of internal democracy among political parties and difficulties in monitoring their election finances.
The acting chairman said that INEC was already working on necessary measures to mitigate the challenges by introducing modern technologies, including the Permanent Voters Cards to the electoral process.
``We have already achieved some success in those regards but we are looking forward for more.`On electoral violence, we have been able to mitigate that with the deployment of our Election Risk Management Tool and with our collaboration with the Inter-Agency Committee on Election Security (IACES),’’ Zakari said.
In his remark the Chief of Defence Intelligent Agency, AVM Monday Morgan, said the foreign attachés were at the commission in recognition of its roles in national development, especially the promotion of democracy.
Morgan who was represented by Col. Everest Okoro, as the leader of the delegation said that the visit of the foreign attaché to INEC was necessitated by the accolades that followed the 2015 general election.
He said the attachés were at INEC basically to familiarise themselves with activities of the commission as part of its routine visits.
``We are all aware that we just concluded the last general elections which were internationally and widely acclaimed to be a huge success.`So it is not surprising that there is a lot of interest to finding out what led to the successes.
``We are all aware that we just concluded the last general elections which were internationally and widely acclaimed to be a huge success.`So it is not surprising that there is a lot of interest to finding out what led to the successes.
Most of the attachés are from African defence agencies and you know democracy in Africa is something that is just growing. So there are interests to understand how it is done, possibly to pick one or two things which they will take back to their countries.
The attaches came from different countries, including United States of America, France, Sudan Angola, United Kingdom and Niger among others.
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