Polls: Moghalu calls for professional approach towards election management

Kingsley Moghalu, former presidential candidate of the Young Progressives Party (YPP), has said that Nigeria must urgently take a professional approach towards managing elections in the country to overcome some of the challenges which have plagued the electoral process in recent years.

Moghalu stated this in an interview with the CNN on Tuesday in reaction to the controversy that has trailed the Independent National Electoral Commission’s conduct of last Saturday’s presidential and National Assembly elections.

Moghalu, who was former deputy governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), said the country could not make progress with the current approach towards management of election logistics, which he said was not handled professionally.

There has been wide criticism of INEC’s handling of the February 25 presidential and National Assembly elections. The commission’s failure to transmit results electronically using the Bimodal Voters Accreditation System (BIVAS) as proscribed by the Electoral Act has led to protests from parties and election observers.

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However, Moghalu noted that Nigeria was using the wrong approach over the years which had failed, stressing that the large number of registered voters in the country was justified for an appraisal of the system.

“Election in Nigeria are seen in the usual logistics way, Nigeria should take a professional approach toward managing elections.

“Eigthy-five million Nigerians collected their PVCs, but the countries never do that, what we see is a huge failure of institutions in Nigeria and it is always at the last minute you would see excuses. There is always vote suppression”, Mogbalu said.

He supported suggestions by former President Olusegun Obasanjo that INEC should re-conduct elections in constituencies where BIVAS was not used initially, since the commission identified the network as the reason for failing to use BIVAS.

“It is a good suggestion and INEC should consider that to boost confidence since they claim it was network failures and nothing more, and then they should be able to repeat some of these elections; if there are problems about the legitimacy of the elections organized”.

He wondered why there was still large vote suppression across the country despite the huge deployments of security agencies, pointing out that they were not well channelled to check violence.

According to him, “There were serious security shortcomings and they should not be happening; a lot of the security agencies, police, and army came into Lagos, but they were not properly positioned to be able to prevent suppression exercise”.