All Progressives Congress (APC) has admitted that politicians were responsible for electoral violence and not the Independent National Electoral (INEC) as erroneously insinuated by some Nigerians.
The party’s national chairman, Dr Abdullahi Ganduje, stated this during a visit of INEC’s election and party monitoring team to the party‘s national secretariat in Abuja yesterday.
Ganduje commended INEC for its handling of the electoral process despite bobby traps set for the commission by parties.
He said, “It is important for INEC, to undertake such visits so that they can obtain the viability of political parties for the sake of planning and records and also as part of their duties as provided by law.
“I want to assure you that our party is a strong party. We are ready to provide all the information required. We want to make our party a very strong institution as required for the development of democracy. Therefore, we have decided to make our party active throughout the year not only during elections.
“We have also directed that all our party offices ranging from wards, local governments, zones, and states, basically the officers must be available. And operationally, the office must be functioning.
“I know one of the biggest problems of INEC in conducting elections is insecurity. Everyone will say INEC, but it is the politicians. So, in order to understand the rules and regulations of elections, in order to understand what is required to be civilised politicians, our institutions will be educating our people from time to time so that they can abide by the rules.”
The INEC director, Election and Party Monitoring, Hawa Habibu, told the APC leadership that they were at the party‘s headquarters on an annual verification of political parties which is a constitutional mandate of the commission.
“Basically, we are supposed to find out and issue notices where political parties are not in compliance with the constitutional provisions as to the number, 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 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 accounts 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 basically our assignments,“ Habibu said.
