Former Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El-Rufai, has accused a northwest Governor of writing election results instead of conducting free and fair elections.
El-Rufai disclosed that the said
Governor had approached him on how to conduct free and fair elections, but
instead of heeding the advice given to him, the Northwest Governor went ahead
to write election results as usual.
El-Rufai stated this on Monday
in Maiduguri, while delivering a lead paper at a capacity-building workshop for
top officials of the Borno State government.
Speaking against the backdrop
of state electoral commissions as rigging tools in the hands of the state
governors, El-Rufai recalled how he used electronic voting to conduct a free
and fair local government areas elections during his tenure as governor.
He narrated that it was after
the success of the local government elections that the Northwest state governor
approached him to use his pattern, but after availing him of the technique used
in conducting the elections, he went back to his state and wrote results of the
local government elections he conducted instead of conducting it
electronically.
El-Rufai, during his lecture,
called for the scrapping of the state electoral commissions, arguing that the
Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) could handle all local
government elections.
“While I was the Governor of
Kaduna State, I introduced electronic voting and conducted local government
election with it. After the election, we lost about three to four local
government areas to the opposition, because of the credibility of the election.
And because we were transparent in the election, some of those opposition
candidates decamped to our party because of our fairness in the election.
“I remember that one governor
from the Northwest who loved the conduct of the election through electronic
voting asked me to assist him with the technology I used in the election, but
because it has the state logo, I told him that it would not cost more than
10,000 US dollars, so that he can get the equipment to conduct his state LGA
election electronically. But after that conversation, I did not hear from him
again, he went back home and conducted his election by writing the results as
usual,” El-Rufai said.
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