Following the challenges faced by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in the 2023 general election, stakeholders have called on the National Assembly to further amend the 2022 Electoral Act to address some of the issues.

According to them, the review of the Electoral Act would ensure that the pitfalls experienced during the last elections do not reoccur in future polls.
The stakeholders spoke to journalists at the presentation of three reports on the 2023 general election by an observer monitoring group, Centre for Transparency Advocacy (CTA), in Abuja.

Speaking at the event, the Executive Director of CTA, Faith Nwadishi, made a case for the amendment of the law to allow for the establishment of an Electoral Offences Commission and Tribunal to deal with electoral offenders.

Nwadishi noted that although concerns had been raised regarding the electoral process, the electoral system in Nigeria has improved despite observed challenges.

She said: “There are some areas we recommended that should be reviewed. For instance, you know that the Electoral Act talks about civic and voter education and the responsibility was given to INEC. “

But we also know that there is a national orientation agency that should be saddled with civic education. Civic education is different from voter education.

There’s a component of voter education in civic education. We need to be able to actually take away the role of civic education from INEC and leave the agency empowered by law to do the work.

“We are also calling on those concerned to quickly set up an electoral offences commission. We cannot continue the way we are going. People are committing crimes but we are saying it is INEC that most prosecute, because INEC has prosecutorial powers to do that.

“On election day, we saw the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) but how effective has that been? We should have a dedicated commission that is saddled with the responsibility of prosecuting electoral offenders, which will go a long way to reform our electoral process. ”

Nwadishi also called for sanctions on political parties that do not deploy adequate agents to polling units on election day.

“Elections are won and lost at polling units because that is where electorates come to cast their votes and that is where results are pronounced before they are taken for collation. So, if you don’t have people representing you at that level, that means you won’t have a copy of your result. There should actually be a sanction for a political party that is vying for election and is not able to deploy party agents at that level,” she added.

Former Resident Electoral Commissioner (REC) of INEC, Enugu State, Emeka Ononamadu, said INEC should revisit issues concerning political party primaries.

While stressing the need for INEC to further employ the use of technology in the electoral process, Ononamadu said the commission must be allowed to concentrate on the technical delivery of elections.

His words: “First of all, I think the Electoral Act as it concerns political party primaries needs to be revisited. This is because that particular law seems not to make political party primaries more inclusive of a larger population of the party members, which are Nigerians and, of course, we all know that the test of political party primaries almost graduates to the general election.

“I think year after year, whether the election administration agency did well or not, there seems to be challenges about how people perceive it and the major area to reduce that either right or wrong perception is to step up technology in our elections.

“Also, the discussion for the establishment of electoral offences tribunal has been ongoing, but I think that if you include the power of investigation for INEC, it would be too much.” He also urged INEC to revisit its manner of recruiting and deploying ad hoc staff, saying the issue of impersonation must be critically looked into.