Ganduje Blame Politicians For Insecurity During Elections, Exonerates INEC

By David Lawani, Abuja

The National Chairman of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) Dr. Abdullahi Umar Ganduje, has excused the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) from violence during election.

The former Kano state governor, however, heaped blames on politicians for insecurity usually experience during election.

Speaking Wednesday during a visit of the INEC officials to the National Secretariat of the APC for verification, Ganduje said his leadership will be educating its members from time to time so as to abide by the rules of election.

According to Ganduje, it’s important for INEC to undertake exercise so that they can obtain the viability of political parties for the sake of planning, records and also part of their duty as provided by law.

“I know one of the biggest problem of INEC in conducting elections is insecurity. Everyone will say INEC, but it’s the politicians.

“So in order to understand the rules and regulations of election, in order to understand what is require to be a civilized politicians our institutions will be educating our people from time to time so that they can abide by the rules and it will be going digital.

“And without the cooperation of our politicians that can be bastardized.”

While assuring the Electoral empire of cooperation, the APC National Chairman told INEC that his leadership has developed mechanisms to make the party active throughout the year not only during election.

“We have also directed that all our party offices ranging from ward, local government, zone, and states, basically the officers must be available. And operationally the office must be functioning so that we are exiting in terms of physical and functional.

“Also, we have decided to make our party an ICT party. We have directed for e-registration of our members and we believe that will help us to partner with INEC to enable democracy.

“This we help us in planning, identify numbers, sex and age bracket in our party, qualification, professionof our party members, identity of our members right from ward level to national level. We do that to improve the democratic principle in the party

“We are developing what we called National Institute for Progressive study in order to teach our members the basic, of democracy so that the issue of hate speech will be eliminated.”

Earlier, the leader of the INEC verification team, Hajiya Hawa Habibu, Director Election and Party Monitoring in her remarks explained that the electoral body was on a constitutional assignment to check all the party and ensure it comply with the basic requirements a functional political party.

She said though the verification was supposed to be annual, she lamented that tbe exercise was carried out last in 2019, while Covid-19 hampered the exercise in 2020 and other electoral activities in 2022 and 2023.

Habibu said: “We are here on an annual verification of political parties. It is a constitutional mandate of the commission. Basically, we are supposed to find out and issue notices where political parties are not in compliance with the constitutional provisions as to the number, structure of the party in terms of the office in Abuja, auditing of their finances and other issues.

“The team will go round to verify the offices with our forms to give us the structure of the party as to whether the Electoral Act provision of minimum of 24 members of different states of the federation and the FCT has been compiled with.”

She noted: “We will also find out whether APC has given us its audited over the years. The last time we had this verification was in 2019, there was COVID-19 in 2020, we had so much activities in 2021 and 2022 and it has become pertinent that we have to do so now to verify political parties to ensure that the compliance status are in order. These are basically our assignments.”