The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has said that it is collaborating with the National Assembly to effect a review of the country’s Electoral Act in order to improve the electoral system.
The acting Chairman of INEC, Hajia Amina Zakari said this when she received some Foreign Defence Attaches with the Defence Intelligence Agency at the commission’s headquarters in Abuja.
She said “We will continuously try to improve the electoral process through legal reviews. `Election laws are not static, they are dynamic. You have to keep on improving on them especially when something comes up, like the issue of diaspora voting, the issue of electronic voting. These are issues that require review and we will keep on recommending to the national assembly for these reviews.
She listed election violence, lack of internal democracy among political parties and difficulties in monitoring their election finances as the challenges facing the commission.
She said “We have already achieved some success in those regards but we are looking forward for more. On electoral violence, we have been able to mitigate that with the deployment of our Election Risk Management Tool and with our collaboration with the Inter-Agency Committee on Election Security (IACES).”
Chief of Defence Intelligent Agency, AVM Monday Morgan who was represented by Col. Everest Okoro said “We are all aware that we just concluded the last general elections which were internationally and widely acclaimed to be a huge success.`So it is not surprising that there is a lot of interest to finding out what led to the successes.
“Most of the attachés are from African defence agencies and you know democracy in Africa is something that is just growing. So there are interests to understand how it is done, possibly to pick one or two things which they will take back to their countries.
“The attaches came from different countries, including United States of America, France, Sudan Angola, United Kingdom and Niger among others.”