‘Naira scarcity susceptible to financial inducement during election’

Council of Retired Federal Permanent Secretaries (CORFEPS), yesterday, lamented the pains and hardship caused by the non-availability of the new notes while the old notes have been withdrawn from circulation.

The group expressed worry that the electorate is now prone to financial inducement during the election, which is one of the key malpractices that the policy was intended to curb.

This was contained in a statement signed by the National Chairman of the group, Goke Adegoroye; Publicity Secretary, Ebele Okeke and 1st Vice Chairman, Yayale Ahmed.

They maintained that attacking vote buying syndrome with strategies that seek to block voters from taking money from candidates focuses merely on the retail end of the election process chain, whereas the real inducement to influence or compromise election outcomes might have already taken place at the wholesale level.

“A lot of this wholesale level of inducement is what has been observed over the past months in the postures and pronouncements coming out of many quarters, including private print and electronic media houses, leadership of cultural, ethnic, regional, traditional, and religious groups, Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) and labour unions as well as prayer merchants.

“The entire nation was treated to how these played out in the past by the open confession of a now late Senator, and in the revelation of the alleged disbursements from certain government agencies which showed the importance attached to ‘taking care’ of security agencies and the above listed groups in any efforts aimed at influencing electoral outcomes. Notwithstanding these concerns, the die is now cast and all that remains is how to manage the election process and the post-election period.”

The group urged the CBN to reappraise its channels of currency distribution and to direct the deposit banks to activate all their physical cash and electronic fund disbursement strategies immediately, to ease the strain of access to the new currencies by the populace throughout the election period.

They noted that the confidence of the populace and political parties in accepting the results of the election is contingent on the integrity of the electoral processes.

The group, therefore, called on Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), to at all levels of its operations, live up to the expectation of Nigerians and the international community as a truly independent entity, immune to the extraneous influences of agents of either the political parties or the sitting administrations, whether in physical forms or through remote cyber hacking challenges.

“We also call on the Intelligence Community to be alert and proactive in its duty of identifying security flash spots to fish out observed malpractices and for the security enforcement agencies to ensure a level playing ground in taking appropriate decisive actions as required by law.’’

“To ensure effective security for the elections, we call on the Federal Government to, through its appropriate agencies, attend to the needs of the Intelligence Community, to avoid any inducement temptations that may arise from inadequate provision for their out-of-station allowances and other sundry hardware requirements.

“We appeal to the conscience of all Public/Civil Servants to remember their traditional non-partisan role and display exemplary patriotism in managing the affairs of the nation at this critical time when their Ministers and other political office holders are out in the political field.”

The group urge Nigerians to eschew violence and deploy their patriotic understanding to embrace the results declared by INEC, in the true spirit of fair game, as we have no other country to call our own.

“Judging from the provisions of section 134 of the Constitution, which is binding on INEC for the declaration of a winner in a presidential election, the stark realities of our national situation in this Constitutional Democracy is that all the major ethnic groups need each other to produce the president of the federation, as no ethnic group can make it alone.

“Accordingly, we enjoin whoever emerges as winner to be humbled by the reality that he owes his victory mainly to the support outside his ethnic group while at the same time imploring those that fall short of meeting those conditions not to see their result from the narrow prism of ethnic resentment but as a clarion call to double their efforts, to foster our joint aspiration for national unity.”