WORRIED by the escalation in vote buying at recent elections, the Inter-party Advisory Council (IPAC) is to set up a legal body to interact with Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to tackle the menace.
The newly elected Chairman of the Council, Chief Peter Ameh, disclosed this during the inauguration of the executives in Abuja on Tuesday, stressing the need to continue to interact with government on the way forward.
He said: “Government continues. In the previous government, we had meetings to be able to deliberate how to monitor all this process. I came on board about one week now and I assure you we will continue from there.
“There are more than three lawyers in this current executive committee of IPAC. This team was strategically selected because we need the brain of legal luminary who will be able to benefit us on issues like vote buying.
“So, the executive was specifically selected to function in a way that the laws of the land permit us to work for the benefit of Nigeria people.
“We are going to have a legal group with the Inter-Party Advisory Council to create a way that INEC will see as the way we can solve this menace of vote buying.”
The new IPAC boss also addressed his recent invitation by the police following his election, saying that if the invitation was not political, he should be done with them in no time.
He said: “I have been invited by the Nigeria Police to come and give account, though I left office as the Secretary-General (of IPAC) three years ago and there have been successive administrations after me. So, I do not know why there is an isolation of that particular invitation.
“So, I will go there and answer to the call of the Nigeria Police as the law-abiding citizen of this country and I will tender my case effectively and see how it goes.
“If the case is not politically motivated and they get my statement, I will be out in the meantime.
“Am not a person who is giving to speculation. There are suspicions that it may be related to the IPAC election and a lot of angles. But, personally, I will go and listen and then answer their questions and then draw my conclusion.
“It is my interaction with police and how civil they will be that will determine what the police is pursuing, whether they are genuinely pursuing a case or they are pursuing me because an election has been won and lost.”
Also speaking with newsmen at the event, the spokesman of Coalition of United Political Party (CUPP), Ikenga Ugochinyere said that the leadership of IPAC would ensure that enabling is created as the nation match into the 2019 general elections.
Asked how the enabling environment would be created, Ugochinyere said that the council “is to engage key stakeholders, the lawmakers and the election management body which is INEC.”
He further said: “The first task for us is to see that the amended electoral act is signed into law. It has been going back and forth between the Presidency and the Parliament.
“The leadership of IPAC has already secured a meeting with the Senate President to prevail on him and other parliamentarians to remove all the gray areas that the President has raised and sent a clean version back, so that the President can sign it into law, because the electoral act holds the key to solve some of our electoral problems. With the provision that even when the card reader is not working you shift your election till the next day. So accreditations and transition of result become constitution and that will end the change of result that usually take place.
“On the issue of vote buying we have been engaging INEC even before now, to see that the position of ballot box where the people cast their vote is secure, in a way that even when you offer money to somebody you may not be able to know the party the person will actually vote for, these are the two major things we handling.”
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