Electoral violence: Ganduje clears INEC, blames politicians

The National Chairman of the All Progressives Congress, Abdullahi Ganduje, has accused politicians of being responsible for the violence experienced during elections.

Ganduje made his position known when the Independent National Electoral Commission's verification team visited him at the APC headquarters in Abuja on Wednesday.

He stated, “I know one of the biggest problems of INEC in conducting elections is insecurity. Everyone will say INEC, but it's the politicians.

“So to understand the rules and regulations of the election, to understand what is required to be a civilised politician, our institutions will be educating our people from time to time so that they can abide by the rules and it will be going digital.

“And without the cooperation of our politicians, that can be bastardised.”

Ganduje, who commended INEC officials for the visit, revealed that the APC will be active throughout the year not only during the election.

The APC Chairman stated, “We have also directed that all our party offices from ward, local government, zone, to states, basically the officers must be available. And operationally the office must be functioning so that we exist in terms of physical and functional.

“Also, we have decided to make our party an ICT party. We have directed for e-registration of our members and we believe that will help us to partner with INEC to enable democracy.

“This helps us in planning, identifying numbers, sex, and age bracket in our party, qualifications, profession of our party members, and identity of our members right from ward level to national level. We do that to improve the democratic principle in the party

“We are developing what we call National Institute for Progressive study to teach our members the basics, of democracy so that the issue of hate speech will be eliminated.”

Earlier in her remarks, the leader of the INEC verification team, Director of Election and Party Monitoring, Hawa Habibu, disclosed that the commission is reviewing all political parties to ensure their adherence to the fundamental criteria of a viable political party.

She said, “We are here on an annual verification of political parties. It is a constitutional mandate of the commission. We are supposed to find out and issue notices where political parties are not in compliance with the constitutional provisions as to the number, and structure of the party in terms of the office in Abuja, auditing of their finances, and other issues.

“The team will go round to verify the offices with our forms to give us the structure of the party as to whether the Electoral Act provision of a minimum of 24 members of different states of the federation and the FCT has been compiled with.

“We will also find out whether APC has given us its audited over the years. The last time we had this verification was in 2019, there was COVID-19 in 2020, we had so many activities in 2021 and 2022 and it has become pertinent that we have to do so now to verify political parties to ensure that the compliance status is in order. These are our assignments.”