By; BAYO AKAMO, Ibadan
The Chairman Senate Committee on Electoral Matters, Senator Sarafadeen Alli on Wednesday, disclosed that the 10th National Assembly joint committee is working towards improving Nigeria electoral process.
Senator Alli according to a statement made available to journalists in Ibadan by his Special Adviser on Media, Mr Akeem Abas, stated this while featuring on a Channels Television programme ‘Sunrise Daily’.
The Chairman Senate Committee on Electoral Matters said in doing
this, the joint committee of the 10th National Assembly would abridge the time for filing and concluding election petitions in the country.
According to him, pre-election matters must be concluded before elections, while election matters are concluded before swearing-in, Senator Alli .
” We will work assiduously to ensure improvement on the technology deployed for the electoral process and guidelines already in place,” he said.
The Chairman Senate Committee added, ” We were in Lagos some days back for a retreat. By the 28 of this month, we are having another town hall meeting here in Abuja to ensure people bare their mind on the electoral laws”.
“We, in the 10th Senate will ensure laws are made to have positive impacts on the electoral process and our people. We want to ensure that by next year, we would have made lots of improvements,”
Speaking further, Senator Alli noted that the last general election in the country was better than previous elections, as there have been significant improvements on the electoral process.
He maintained that majority of Nigerians and INEC itself wants the commission unbundled in terms of functions, while every matter concerning electoral process would be looked into to allow for more transparency in our electoral system.
Emphasizing that there was no perfect elections anywhere in the world, Senator Alli pointed out that the electoral process in Nigeria was getting better on daily basis, Senator Alli said “Perfection is relative. We still have issues on election across the world. If we can improve the electoral process to get 90 percent perfection, then we are good for it”.
Lauding the 9th National Assembly under the leadership of Sen. Ahmed Lawan for passing the 2022 Electoral law which allowed the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS) as game changer, Senator Alli said the Electoral Act 2022 brought lots of improvements to the voting process and other legislations concerning the election.
Senator Alli pointed out that efforts would be made to ensure the BVAS machine store data to prevent interval reconfiguration of the machine by INEC and that though the electoral law does not mandate INEC to upload results on a portal, they would mandate INEC to upload every result on the portal in the coming elections.
The Senator who was part of the team that monitored the just concluded Liberian presidential election, described the election as well organised, transparent and fair.
Senator Alli commended the patriotism displayed by Liberians during the election, urging Nigerians to emulate such attitude as they look forward to a greater country.
