FCT Area Council elections

Elections to elect chairpersons and councilors for the six area councils of the Federal Capital Territory [FCT] were conducted by the Independent National Electoral Commission [INEC] on Saturday, April 9, 2016.  The six councils are Kwali, Abaji, Gwagwalada, Bwari, Kuje and Abuja Municipal Area Council [AMAC]. At the end of the first day of the […]

Elections to elect chairpersons and councilors for the six area councils of the Federal Capital Territory [FCT] were conducted by the Independent National Electoral Commission [INEC] on Saturday, April 9, 2016.  The six councils are Kwali, Abaji, Gwagwalada, Bwari, Kuje and Abuja Municipal Area Council [AMAC]. At the end of the first day of the exercise, the APC candidate was declared winner in Bwari Area Council but INEC returning officers declared four chairmanship races to be inconclusive and ordered supplementary elections for Wednesday last week. 
This is the only local level election in the country that INEC conducts, since local government elections in the states are conducted by their State Independent Electoral Commissions [SIECS]. It is generally believed that SIECs make a mess of their elections and almost always plan for ruling parties at the state level to sweep all the posts at stake. Even though INEC started badly in this one by postponing the polls from last month, there were high hopes that it will do a better job than SIECs do. In the event, by declaring so many chairmanship polls as inconclusive, the sad trend of inconclusive elections observed from Kogi to Bayelsa and Rivers continued into the FCT elections.
According to the INEC Resident Electoral Commission for the FCT Prof. Jacob Jatau, elections were cancelled 39 polling units in 20 registration areas due to violence, over-voting and non-use of smart card readers for voter accreditation. At the end of the supplementary elections, three incumbent chairmen lost their re-election bids as the All Progressives Congress (APC) claimed three of the four area councils of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) where supplementary elections were conducted while All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) candidate won the Gwagwalada chairmanship contest.
FCT Chairman of Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) Alhaji Yahaya Yunusa Suleiman accused INEC of culpability in the unsatisfactory election in some of the Area Councils. He alleged that the inconclusive election was pre-planned by the FCT INEC to rig into office a favoured political party and said the FCT Area Councils Election was marred by illegitimate voters’ participation. On his part, the All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate in the Abuja Municipal Area Council (AMAC), Abdullahi Adamu Candido, said the increasing rate of inconclusive elections do not augur well for INEC as an institution. He called for concerted efforts by stakeholders to ensure that elections are conclusive and final.
While some of the failure to conduct election in some polling units was due to logistical hitches, failure to deliver election materials in time and occasional failure of the card reader machine, in most cases it was caused by violence, snatching of election materials and use of thugs by parties and their candidates. Even though the FCT Police Command had prior to the elections assured voters of their safety, thugs still succeeded in disrupting the elections in many polling units.
While we urge INEC to continue to improve upon its logistic arrangements and also work to reduce incidents of failure of the card reader, it is clear that most of the blame for the series of inconclusive polls we have had lies first with politicians who sponsor violence, and secondly with the security agencies that fail to stop it. It is not encouraging at all the combined forces of the police, Department of State Services [DSS] and Nigeria Civil Defence and Security Corps [NCDSC] could not contain these thugs. In fact, thugs even succeeded in invading INEC’s Gwagwalada collation centre and manhandled its officials when the election in that area council was declared inconclusive.
A way must therefore be found to discourage politicians from deploying thugs and disrupting elections. Where education will not do, raw enforcement power should be able to do it. The fear here is that if a local election cannot be secured, what will happen the next time when the whole country is voting?