News Desk
President Bola Tinubu has been admonished to emulate the steps taken by late former Nigeria’s president, Umaru Yar’Adua to address the tension raised by his election victory in 2007, when he admitted that the election process that gave him victory in that year’s presidential polls was flawed by some irregularities.
Laolu Akande, a former senior special adviser to ex-Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, who gave the advice while speaking at a Channels Television morning show, Sunrise Daily, urged President Bola Tinubu to openly admit that the country’s electoral process requires fixing.
Recall that the late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua once admitted that the process that brought him to office was flawed, even as his election was then challenged by the then presidential candidate of the defunct Congress for Progressives Change (CPC) Mohammadu Buhari and his political party
Buhari’ later became Nigeria’s president in 2015 after his party, CPC, had merged with other opposition political parties to form the now ruling All Progressives Congress (APC)
Akande noted that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) failed to fulfill it’s numerous electoral promises to Nigerians’ including the promise that the results of the 2023 election would be uploaded from the polling units to INEC elections viewing portal, the IREV.
He noted INEC has however been able to explain to the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal, PEPT, justices that “Look, we are not compelled by the law to transmit the results” because it was only a promise and not a law.
The former aide to the former vice president emphasized that while INEC still has to try and rebuild trust, the President should come out to condemn the poor job done by the electoral umpire.
He said, “The President himself, at the end of the day, ought to also come out, just like President Yar’Adua did, to say, “Look, I understand that we have to fix the electoral process, and I think a lot of what we should do at the end of the day is to come back and look at the reforms.”
