INEC seeks more autonomy, to limit campaign funding
From Sunny Ogefere, Asaba
TO strengthen the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) as an autonomous and impartial body, the legal instruments and guidelines setting it up are to be reviewed.
The Chairman of INEC, Dr. Abel Guobadia, who disclosed this in Asaba during the opening of a seminar reviewing the electoral process, said that the planned exercise was a fallout of earlier workshops organised by the electoral body.
According to him, the workshops had highlighted and recommended several areas of constitutional and legal reforms, embracing among others, the reconstitution of the Commission to make it an autonomous and impartial body.
"A draft electoral law, which takes account of the recommendations is being finalised by the Commission and will shortly be forwarded to government for use as it sees fit," he stated in an address delivered by his Special Assistant, Mr. Osaze Uzi.
Guobadia, who said that some of the recommendations might entail amendment of certain sections of the 1999 Constitution, however noted that there was the need to go beyond constitutional amendments.
He said: "While there is need to make these amendments, the consolidation of electoral democracy and development of electoral process in Nigeria, in my view, require much more than autonomy, independence, impartiality, technical competence of the commission and the setting of limits on political campaign finance."
In particular, he said, proper conduct was essential for the deepening and strengthening of electoral democracy.
He assured that INEC would be open to all reasonable criticism and suggestions arising from the current workshop and that those that required constitutional amendments or legislative intervention would be forwarded to the appropriate authorities for a necessary action.
Governor James Ibori of Delta State, who opened the workshop, said that it was a matter of deep concern that since the first elections, the same problems, which reduced the credibility of voting in the country were repeated at every polls.
He said that these problems undermined the system and the mechanism for the exercise of the rights of the people to determine their elected representatives.
Besides, he noted that the various constitutional changes and attempts under both the parliamentary and presidential systems had not solved the problem associated with the conduct of elections in the country.
"Are these seeming failures not pointers to the fact that what matters might not be the constitutional form but what politicians do with the rules," he queried.
According to Ibori, political parties as stakeholders in the political process have a duty to ensure that politicians with undemocratic, uncompromising and intolerant attitudes are not allowed to practice politics of selfishness and bitterness.
He criticised a situation where powerful ethnic associations inhibit the building of a truly national party system, saying it was dangerous to democracy.
The governor said that the electoral body must ensure that politicians run issue-oriented electioneering campaigns to avoid the pitfalls associated with a plural society like Nigeria, where sentiments of ethnicity, language and religion could easily be employed.
