Nigerians were full of hope that the Professor Mahmood Yakubu-led Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, would conduct a general election in 2023 which would surpass the highly-applauded exercise handled by Prof. Attahiru Jega’s regime in 2015 in acceptability. But the fiasco of the presidential election on February 25, 2023 has continued to beget weird offspring in the subsequent subnational elections.

In the same manner that Prof. Yakubu abandoned the INEC guidelines in the collation of results and announced the winner, the Commission’s Resident Electoral Commissioner, REC, in Adamawa State, Hudu Ari, usurped the role of the Returning Officer, RO, Professor Mohammed Mele, and announced the governorship candidate of the All Progressives Congress, APC, Senator Aishatu Dahiru (Binani) as the winner of the governorship election.

Adamawa was one of the states in which the March 11, 2023 governorship election was declared inconclusive by INEC, and bye-elections rescheduled for April 16, 2023. Ari made the announcement off-the-cuff while results from 10 local government areas were yet to be collated. His strange behaviour had manifested during the governorship election when he was overheard in a voice note ordering electoral officials to “rig” the election in Binani’s favour, an allegation Ari has never debunked.

Ari and his cohorts were responsible for the fake news and Twitter trend announcing Binani as the “first elected female governor” while elections were still ongoing on March 11, 2023. Immediately after Ari’s illegal announcement of Binani as the winner over the weekend, she gave an “acceptance” speech.

Beyond the sick comedy that these behavioural displays portrayed, Ari and a good number of INEC officials did not even bother to pretend about their partisanship. For instance, the Lagos State REC, Segun Agbaje, committed hate speech against an ethnic group resident in the state. Top INEC officials were not only accused of brazenly rigging elections but also violated the constitutional rights of fellow Nigerians with impunity. Calls on the INEC Chairman, Yakubu, to repost some of the openly biased officials fell on deaf ears.

We expect the services of Hudu Ari and any other INEC official who violated the electoral law to be terminated while they are brought to book where they contravened the law. Elections in this country will never be trusted again if these shameless lawbreakers are allowed to continue in their posts after slaps on the wrist.

INEC under Prof. Yakubu has really hit the rock bottom. We must resume the journey to redeem the image of our electoral umpire from scratch. Erring INEC officials, including RECs, must go. We must return to the Uwais Commission Report of 2009 and adopt its sterling recommendations that will truly guarantee INEC’s independence. No amount of innovations will yield results if the same set of rotten eggs continue to man our elections.

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