The Independent National Electoral Commission on Monday expressed the fears that over 740,000 persons, mainly from the North Eastern part of the country, may not be able to exercise their voting rights during the 2015 elections.
The region is currently being traumatised by members of Boko Haram, who are constantly bombing, killing and maiming people in Borno, Adamawa and Yobe States.
The Director General of The Electoral Institute, an arm of INEC, Prof. Abubakar Momoh, expressed the fears while speaking at the 9th public lecture organised by the Institute in Abuja.
Momoh disclosed that the figure came from the National Emergency Management Agency.
The affected persons are mostly from the North East geopolitical zone, who have been displaced from their homes by the activity of the insurgent group.
Momoh nonetheless promised that no one would be disenfranchised in the ongoing Permanent Voter Cards registration exercise despite the high number of internally displaced persons.
His words: “People are not sure whether the political ecology is not serene for 2015 election.”
Momoh noted that while the youths have become very important tool for electioneering by the political class, they have been manipulated, disenfranchised and subordinated.
While speaking at the occasion, the Director of African Leadership Centre, Dr. Funmi Olonisakin, who delivered the lecture, blamed the increase in electoral violence on “elite connivance and complicity in electoral violence” as well as low level of prosecution of offenders.
Dr. Olonisakin noted that there is predominance of a law enforcement approach in managing electoral violence rather than using political approach.
According to him: “The empirical reality at the moment is that elections that follow power-sharing arrangements have tended to be less violent.
“The nature of a political system might invite more violence than others.”
She warned, sternly, that the law enforcement approach, which seems to be overly criminalised, cannot effectively address the problem of electoral violence.
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