An election observer group, Centre for Transparency Advocacy (CTA), has again lamented the ugly trend of vote-buying during Saturday’s governorship election in Osun state.
The group therefore, called on security agencies to take stiff measures against party officials by ensuring that they are held liable for the activities of their agents during elections.
CTA executive director, Faith Nwadishi, stated this during the public presentation of the group’s preliminary report on the observation of the governorship election in Osogbo, the state capital.
She said such measures may be needed to deter politicians from empowering their agents with cash to buy votes.
While commending the performance of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in Saturday’s governorship election, the group, however, slammed politicians and political parties for engaging in vote buying during the election.
She said despite efforts of INEC and security agencies to end vote buying, politicians have continued to evolve new techniques.
She said, “Unfortunately, observers’ report indicated that the ugly trend of vote buying that is fast becoming a major feature of our democracy reared its ugly head during the Osun state gubernatorial election. Our observers reported that vote buying and selling were rife with the major parties deploying new vote buying schemes/tactics to evade security operatives.
“Nigerians, INEC, security agencies and other stakeholders need to work out measures to effectively address this ugly phenomenon. Political parties should be made to understand that encouraging vote buying is a criminal offence while the security agencies should make party officials liable for the vote buying activities of their agents.”
On the performance of the Bi-modal Voter Accreditation System (B-VAS), Nwadishi said INEC showed improvement and deserve commendation.
“Our field observers report indicated that polling officials arrived early in most of the polling units with many of the polling units opening around 7:30am. This is an indication of improvement with regards to election logistics arrangement on the part of INEC. We hope this improvement would be consolidated upon and carried into the 2023 general elections.
“From field reports, with few exceptions, BVAS worked perfectly well in the Osun elections with voter accreditation taking between 1 to 3 minutes on the average. The few cases of issues with the BVAS were reported in Ifelodun, Olonde and Ikirun Ward 8, Unit 7 and Ede North; Ward 5 Unit 16 Alusekere. It is however, heartwarming that these cases were swiftly attended to by INEC officials. We also note that INEC made good its promise to deploy at least two BVAS machines in polling units where they have more than a thousand voters.”
On the performance of security agencies, the CTA boss said their observers’ report indicated that security agents generally arrived early at the polling units and were professional in their conducts, especially in the maintenance of law and order.
