A political think tank under the aegis of Connected Development (CODE)and her partners has faulted the conducts of the 2023 Presidential and National Assembly Election on the basis that it has failed to meet with citizens expectations and benchmark of international election best practices .
The Executive Director of CODE, Hamzat Lawal, disclosed this during a press briefing following the reactions of Nigerians which trailed the result announcement by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC ) in Abuja .
Hamzat highlighted some of their observations on the breakdown of issues that caused systemic disenfranchisement and the process of the electioneering.
” We observed that INEC failed in her ability to organize logistics, which led to the late opening of polls , which saw many polling units close before exhausting the 6 hours of voting time, citing night fall as an excuse in many other polling units (PU) across the country”.
“Citizens’ resilience saw voting conducted late into the night with no power supply or light bulbs , under very unsecured conditions for this purpose, many Nigerians were disenfranchised and the most affected demography were persons with disability, pregnant women and elderly people”.
” Registration Area Centers (RACs) were introduced by INEC to decentralized the coordination of logistics and effective deployment to achieve early opening of polls , yet polls opened in some polling units across the country by 3pm and above “.
” We also observed that INEC in many polling units failed to adhere to her guidelines stipulating that where election fails to hold because of late opening of polls or failure of the Bi- modal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS), INEC shall conduct election in such polling units the next day, INEC chairman, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu reinforced this in his communication on election day assuring Nigerians that if elections did not hold in any polling units that INEC will deploy staff and materials to hold election in such places the next day , we observed that in many of such polling units INEC staff and materials were not deployed to those areas like in Imo state primary health care development agency, New Owerri 1, PU 018 and as such citizens again were disenfranchised”.
he urged INEC to improved on its preparedness for the forth coming gubernatorial and House of Assembly election coming on the 11th of March.
The group however called the citizens to be calm and advised other political candidates who lost in the presidential election to channel their grievances to court of law.
