Afenifere asks Jega to quit INEC

From Ayodele Samuel, Lagos

Afenifere has advised the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Chairman, Prof Attahiru Jega to withdraw the query issued to mostly southern resident electoral commissioners over the botched attempt to create lopsided 30,000 new polling units.

The Pan-Yoruba group urged him to concentrate on plans for the elections.

Afenifere National Publicity Secretary, Yinka Odumakin, in a statement, said, “If he is far too gone into his sectional agenda, he should step aside from INEC and move over to any of the fora promoting what he desires.”

Afenifere said “If it was true that the said query was issued on sectional focus on the matter, in which the INEC chairman betrayed unpardonable primordial insensitivity, we are bound to conclude that Prof Jega is becoming more dreadful to the health of the polity than the murderous Boko Haram.

“Even without its lopsidedness in favour of Jega’s region of the country, the whole idea of creating new polling units a few months to election was a product of inferior scholarship, for a man from an intellectual region hailed across the country in 2010 as a “man of integrity”, when he was nominated for the job in 2010,” the statement said in part.

Afenifere lamented that it is equally baffling that rather than “addressing the glaring incompetence of INEC, which have seen it bungling the distribution of PVCs for data captured four years ago, Jega would now be occupied with fighting a war of attrition within the commission.

“We are less than 90 days to the general elections and we have yet to see concrete preparations from the electoral body to conduct a successful poll.

Given the importance of 2015 and all the predictions of the implications it holds for the corporate existence of Nigeria, we do not need a champion of fault lines at the head of the electoral commission.”, it stated.