Many more things remain to be done to further improve the conduct of elections in Nigeria but on top of it all, Nigerians' attitude to politics must change from the current one of regarding it as a financial investment requiring a do-or-die approach, chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission [INEC] Professor Attahiru Jega said in Kaduna at the weekend.Speaking on Radio Nigeria Kaduna's Hausa phone in programme Hannu Da Yawa, the INEC chairman said many things have been done by the commission since last year to improve election conduct but the do-or-die attitude of politicians and some of their supporters impede the attainment of some of the objectives.He listed some of the commission's changes since last year to include ensuring that no election candidate was discriminated against, removing INEC officials as election returning officers in order to improve impartiality, reducing the 7am to 6pm voting time which previously allowed wholesale rigging, adopting the method of accreditation of voters and voting immediately afterwards which reduced ballot box snatching since a lot of people were around at the polling station.Jega said there are some states in Nigeria where politics is particularly hot which makes the work of election officials particularly challenging. He mentioned Kogi, Delta and Imo as states with hot politics. He said already in Kogi, as the governorship election approaches in December, there are signs of do-or-die politics re-emerging among the political class. He urged leaders of political parties and other elders to step in at this stage and nip the problems in the bud.He also accused all the major political parties in the country of making illegal candidate substitutions during the last general elections. Jega said even though the law empowers political parties to nominate their own election candidates, the electoral law also requires them to do so through democratic primary elections duly observed by INEC officials. He said wherever INEC observed a discrepancy between the candidate names submitted by a political party and result of the primary elections that its officials observed, it was required under the law to draw the party's attention to the discrepancy.According to the chairman, 870,000 people all over the country were found to have done multiple registration during the last voter registration exercise. He said 200 of them have so far been prosecuted for the offence. Regretting the very small number of prosecutions thus far, he blamed it on lack of adequate lawyers and said the commission was also overwhelmed by having to be a party in every case before the election tribunals, for which it has to hire lawyers to represent it.He also said more offenders will be brought to book for double registration. He called for the establishment of the Electoral Offences Tribunal as recommended by the Justice Mohamed Lawal Uwais panel on electoral reforms, of which he was a member. He said lack of punishment for election offenders encourages more people to violate election laws with impunity.
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