2015 polls: There’ll be trouble if Adamawa, Borno, Yobe are exempted —Uwais FORMER Chief Justice of Nigeria, CJN, Mohammed Uwais, yesterday, warned that the 2015 elections would run into troubled waters if the exercise billed for February 14 was not held in the troubled states of Adamawa, Yobe and Borno. Speaking with newsmen in Abuja, while attending a sensitisation workshop with a theme: “Nigeria 2015 Elections and Beyond: Stakeholders Conference on the Roles of the State and Non-State Actors in Mitigating Violence in Elections, Uwais also noted that there could be what he called a “lacuna” if the Internally Displaced Persons, IDPs, were not allowed to exercise their franchise during the 2015 polls. This was even as the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, Prof Attahiru Jega, said that 16 million names of voters were cleaned out from the voters’ register following irregularities. He said over four million names were found to be double registrants while close to 12 million were under-age registrants and those with incomplete record. …regrets non implementation of his electoral reform c’ttee’s report Uwais regretted the non implementation of his Electoral Reform Committee’s report by the Chief Olusegun Obasanjo’s administration, saying the implementation of the report would have completely stopped electoral violence in the country. He said he was seriously disturbed that after wasting his energy, spending sleepless days and nights to come out with a solution for the country’s electoral system, the end result was thrown to the dustbin by the government, noting that such had become the general practice by every government in power in the country. He said: “It has become a norm in Nigeria that when committees are set up by government and when the committees submit their reports, the reports don’t normally get fully implemented. That is what has also become of what you call the ‘Uwais Committee Report.’ “I don’t feel regret but I feel disturbed because a lot of problems we are facing now could have been solved if some of the recommendations of the committee had been implemented. For instance, this morning, we heard that of 1,000 electoral offences which INEC is given the responsibility to prosecute, they have only been able to do so in respect of only 211.
Posted on: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 07:42:02 +0000
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