2019: INEC to reorganise polling units to curb vote buying

THE Independent Electoral Commission (INEC), has said that the Commission would embark on the reorganisation of polling units across the country in order to curb the menace of vote buying and ensure credible poll ahead of 2019 general election.

Speaking after a Seminar on Political Party Ideology and Inclusive Youth Participation in Politics, an INEC Commissioner and the Chairman Election and Party Monitoring Committee, Professor Antonia Simbine said that various measures have been put in place by INEC to ensure credible poll in 2019.

The seminar which was organised by the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WED), had in attendance the representative of political parties in Nigeria, Civil Society Organizations, INEC and other stakeholders.

Professor Simbine said efforts were being made to curb the activities of vote buying on election days. She noted that the process would start with the upcoming Osun Governorship election.

“We are making all efforts to ensure that the elections are properly organized and conducted, and the Election Day activity is a major aspect of the activities that we carry out during an election, it is unfortunate that the phenomenon of vote buying is trying to spoil all the efforts that we have been making.

“Moving on, we hope that we can reorganise the polling units in ways that whether people want to sell (votes) or people want to buy (votes) does not happen or happen easier or them, so we are reorganising those processes, unfortunately some of the locations are open spaces, but we will do our best, the efforts we will make in Osun, am sure will be a marker to what is going to happen in the 2019 elections in the sense that what we do and how we are able to reconstruct or reorganise the polling units with the support of the security agencies will diminish this bad problem that we are seeing around”.

Furthermore, she said “we are doing a lot, we are doing voter education, we just finished continuous voter registration, we are doing Permanent Voters’ Card (PVC) collection, we are cleaning up our ICT machines, like the card reader, we are monitoring the political primaries, we are planning for that, and we will soon go into the nomination processes, a lot is being done, we are training our staff.

“We are working with the security agencies, we had interagency consultation meetings last Friday and it was a very successful one, the National Security Adviser was there, the Inspector General of Police was represented, and several heads of security agencies. As you all know we are planning for the Osun Governorship election now, that is a major election, it is when we conclude with that that we will continue and expand other activities regarding the general election”.

The Country Representative of WED, Adebowale Olorunmola said the seminar was targeted at increasing citizen participation in politics and educate Nigerians on political parties ideologies which have been downplayed in the nation’s polity.

“The main objective of this gathering is to educate ourselves about political parties ideologies and why it important to citizen participation, not only citizen participation, but quality participation and the concern about participation actually emanated from the fact that we have had a lot of defections from one party to the other in recent times, and there has been very active push for youth participation but we understand that we don’t want youths to move from one platform to another, we want very qualitative participation for the youths and therefore we want to look at how we can bring about increased use of party ideology in our political parties in organising citizen participation”, Olorunmola added.