Civil rights advocacy group, the Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA), says the people of Edo State and by extension the whole of Nigeria should be thankful to the decisive actions of the governments of both the United States and the United Kingdom in slamming extensive travel bans on election offenders for the decency and near perfect management of the Edo State governorship.

The rights group said in a statement by its national coordinator, Comrade Emmanuel Onwubiko, that the poll, which has apparently seen the electorate having the last laugh contrary to what obtained in previous elections conducted by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) under the leadership of Prof Mahmood Yakubu and especially the violence-prone governorship polls in Kogi and Bayelsa which actually propelled the recent visa sanctions imposed on some “notorious” election manipulators.

HURIWA said in the statement: “We in the organised civil society community in Nigeria will consistently sustain the campaign for electoral probity and sanity just as we will use this opportunity of the freest and fairest elections that has ever happened since 2015 to warn the President of the Court of Appeal and the Chief Justice of Nigeria to buckle up and shake off the accumulated public image nightmares haunting the judicial system because of the tendencies for bribery and corruption by most judges handling post-elections litigation in the country.

“We want to warn that the Supreme Court has become ethically challenged and has become notorious as the All Progressives Congress (APC) wing of the nation's judiciary which demands comprehensive reforms and reorganization.”

The rights group also challenged INEC to wage a “determined internal warfare against systemic and systematic ineptitude and compromises,” which, it noted, constitutes the greatest threats to conduct of free, fair, peaceful and transparent elections in Nigeria.

According to HURIWA, the electoral commission was forced to sit up by the strong warning from the United States and the United Kingdom to impose travel ban on any election manipulators in the Edo state governorship poll.

“The timely issuance of a public reprimand by the two major global democracies of the United States and the United Kingdom is the single most important reason behind the decision by the usually institutionally weak and corrupt Independent National Electoral Commission headed by Prof Yakubu to respect the popular will of the good people of Edo state to democratically elect a governor of their choice.

“We congratulate the good people of Edo state for achieving this political mileage and indeed a revolution of democratically picking their choice as their political leader for the next four years and we are hoping that the re-elected Governor Godwin Obaseki will not disappoint the confidence reposed in him by the hundreds of thousands of the electorate of Edo State. He saw how determined most of the good people of Edo state were to ensure that their state is not hijacked by a desperate political clique aligned to a maverick political warlord in Lagos.”

The rights group said the nation must not go to sleep but the citizens should actively demand that the National Assembly and the Federal Government put the strategic steps and measures in place and on time to reform the electoral system beginning with the appointment of a top quality Nigerian who is not compromised to head the electoral commission.

HURIWA also noted that there is the urgent need to ensure that election offenders are subjected to the due process of the law and punished for their misconduct which constitutes a grave threat to constitutional democracy.

The rights group implored to accept the result and not go to court for litigation because of the unambiguous evidence that the conduct of the election was free, fair, transparent and peaceful.

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