Former President, Olusegun Obasanjo, on Sunday warned that the 2019 election may not be free and fair. He condemned the controversial appointment of Amina Zakari as head of
the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) collation centre.
Obasanjo said the development was a sign that the body may rig the
polls for President Muhammadu Buhari and the All Progressives Congress
(APC).
In a lengthy statement made available to DAILY POST by his media team
on Sunday, Obasanjo said: “Amina Zakari has become too controversial a
figure to be able to give assurance of free, fair and credible election
for INEC.”
The statement titled “Points for concern and action” reads in part:
“President Buhari and her family have declared that there is no blood
relationship but there is relationship through marriage and that is more
than enough for the good lady to step aside. A judge does not sit in
judgement over a case once he or she becomes a cause for controversy or
one side in the case has strongly objected to the judge.
“Madam Amina Zakari should, in honour, stay out and not be seen as a
source of contamination of the election. Otherwise, it will be
difficulty to deny the rumour that she is being assigned to Collation
Centre for one duty only – to write out figures that are not results of
the voting in the field on fake results sheets without water mark or on
genuine results sheets which she will have access to as a Commissioner.
“Amina Zakari is not the only Commissioner that can be in the
Collation Centre. Let the INEC Chairman act boldly and impartially and
prove his absolute neutrality and responsiveness to contribute to make
the election peacefully free, fair and credible. His integrity needs to
be transparently demonstrated.
“We should remember that there had been reports of INEC sponsored
rigging in the past, and also with INEC officials through collation and
with officials being put in party coordinators’ dresses and working for
the political party favoured by INEC and also putting the dresses of
other parties on INEC-favoured parties and police uniforms on
INEC-favoured parties to rig all the elections for the favoured party.
“Like all of us, INEC knows all these and it should devise means to
make sure they do not happen. But will they? One way will be to only
allow card readers to be means of authenticating voters and where there
is no such authentication, it should mean no voting.
“The second is to use only identity cards with watermarks issued by
INEC itself to party officials only for identification of political
party coordinators, officials and agents and not political parties
dresses or arm and wrist bands which anybody can wear for purposes of
identification on election duty or function.
“Both the Presidency and the National Assembly must so far be
commended for adequately providing funding as confirmed by INEC, and
therefore funding cannot be an excuse for poor performance by INEC.”