The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has said that political parties, aspirants and candidates have the rights to uphold the internal democracy of other political parties through legal address.
Commissioner in charge of information and voters enlightenment, Festus Okoye said this when he appeared on national TV with Sen. Victor Umeh where they talked on the furore associated with INEC response to All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) on local government elections.
He said while the party could not vouch for the delegate list generated for the local government elections in the All Progressives Grand Alliance, (APGA).
Okoye said, “Look, as at the time the letter was written they had a window to rectify one or two things if they wanted to do so.
“Look, we are asked to vouch for what we know nothing about and a lawyer wrote the commission saying can we have your report for the Anambra APGA and we said we do not have a report.
The national chairman of APGA wrote to us dated 16th date of June saying “forwarding of a comprehensive list of
delegates of APGA primary elections for Anambra State 2021. He forwarded this list.
“We said we have seen this on your list. We are not in a position to confirm this your list or validate the circumstances in which this list generated.
“Our reason was that Section 85 of the electoral Act, whether you are doing a meeting or a congress or a convention, so long as it revolves around the nomination of candidates the commission is obligated to send monitors to go and monitor it. So that, we will have a monitoring report of the political party, we received the letter on the 16th day of June 2021 and replied on the 18 of June 2021.
“There is no paragraph in the letter that talks about disqualification, what we said is that we drew the attention of [the party to the fact] that they did not give us notice of the delegate Congress which they did not conduct and we also drew their attention to the fact that we were not invited to that delegate conference.
“If there are deductions; if people are doing their interpretations, it has nothing to do with the Commission, the commission is a regulatory body. If the law gives us the power to sanction, definitely, we will sanction. If the law has not given us the power to sanction. We will not sanction.
“The law has given the aspirant and the political party’s the leverage, the mandate and the constitutional and legal right to challenge whatever has happened he said.
In his argument, Sen. Victor Umeh, who argued that the party made public the schedule of event in two national dailies because INEC is a public institution.
He argued that “He is the commissioner for information let me tell you, if you write anything that is an outcast to the image of INEC tomorrow in the new papers, he will react to it.
“They see all these things, so trying to feign ignorance to this thing that it is not being written to the commission now, is not fair to APGA,” he noted.
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