INTERVIEW: How Buhari’s refusal to sign electoral amendment bill affected 2019 elections (1) – INEC Chairman

The INEC chief speaks on diverse issues affecting Nigeria's elections, including electoral laws, card readers and diaspora voting.

headquarters in Abuja, the electoral commission chairman, Mahmood Yakubu, and his team sat for an interview with a PREMIUM TIMES team led by the Publisher, Dapo Olorunyomi.

On the conduct of primaries by political parties and nomination of candidates, what we need to report here is, recently the commission had a meeting and issued a statement about the conduct of political primaries that have served the commission notice. According to the timetable and schedule of activities, primaries started on Sunday, the 18th, a few days ago, and it would end on the 5th of September. While submission of nomination forms would start immediately till about 9th of September.

We are not doing the Continuous Voter Registration for the two elections simply because since 2017, we started the CVR nationwide as provided by the law. So, this staggering continuous voter registration is obviated for the fact that we are not doing nationwide continuous voter registration. And we hope to resume voter registration early in the new year. Now there are tight schedules for each election.

Yakubu: Actually there is a file on my table there with a bunch of proposals for constitutional amendments to the Electoral Act and what we call the electoral legal framework in general. So we would look at what we submitted to the last National Assembly and the matters arising from the last 2019 general election; so we can include this in our proposal before we submit to the national assembly.

What we would have loved to see happen was a speedy resolution on the legal framework because we could not conclude our regulations and guidelines because works have not been concluded on the electoral legal framework. You need the electoral legal framework to determine your regulations and guidelines because you draw from the Electoral Act. Because we could not conclude work on the legal framework, we could not conclude on the training manual.

There are two issues in diaspora voting which we need to clarify. First, we have what is called Out of Country Voting, OCV. Out of Country Voting is where we have people who are registered voters in the country and are on national service or assignment outside the country. For instance, the military, members of the diplomatic corps and Nigerians engaging in technical corps. In some countries, they are given the right to vote; but it is for the same reason people cannot vote outside the country.

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