By: Sunday Oyewole Realizing that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) does not have capacity to deal with electoral offences, the Commission’s chairman, Prof. Attahiru Jega, has again called on the National Assembly to establish Electoral Offences Commission.
Jega spoke on Tuesday at a workshop on INEC/Democracy and Good Governance (DGD) experience-sharing and confidence building organized for political parties in Abuja.
The workshop which also targeted the women and youth wing of the political parties focuses on the voters’ register, continuous voter registration and permanent voters’ card.
The INEC boss insisted that it lacks capacity to prosecute all the electoral offenders and therefore, calling on the lawmakers to revisit the Justice Mohammed Uwais-led Electoral Reform Committee, which recommended a Special Commission that will handle prosecution of electoral offenders.
“I have mentioned our partnership with security agents. We are doing our best to apprehend and prosecute culprits if it happens but we are also trying to prevent it from happening.
“In the past, there was no successful prosecution of those who have committed this crime. Since we came to the commission we have been able to apprehend and prosecute some of them. We have been able to prosecute about 200 people who have committed electoral offences.
“We have prosecuted electoral offenders and the evidence is on our website. Before we came to the commission, there is no single evidence of one person that has been prosecuted for electoral offences.
“Unfortunately, there are too many people who have committed these offences and we do not have the capacity to persecute everybody. We do not have the resources to attract a large legal department that can help in the prosecution.
“And that is why Mohammed Uwais commission has recommended the establishment of Election Offences Commission.”
He also recalled that it was not the first time he would be calling on the lawmakers to set machinery in motion to establish the Commission, saying “as far back as October 2010 even before the 2011 election, I wrote to the then Speaker of the house of Representatives and the President of the Senate, reminding them that there is that recommendation of justice Mohammed Lawal Uwais that they should put the machinery in motion to do that.
“I gave this condition before the 2011 April election, now we have again recommended that the commission should be established so that full time it will function. But until that commission is established, we will continue to do it but we may not be able to go on because of the investigation and other things which we do not have adequate capacity to be able to do,” Jega told the participants.
