The President General of the Ohanaeze Ndigbo, Chief John Nnia Nwodo, has expressed fears over the conduct of the 2019 general election, saying the election may not be transparent.
He made this known in an interview with The Sun published on Saturday.
Nwodo said, “Evidences are arising from Kano indigenes now that a number of people who are not Nigerians are coming into Nigeria to register for the next election. Where are their addresses? INEC has done an administrative inquiry; fine, but in law you can’t be a judge in your own case. INEC could not have made a mistake, and be the one to investigate its own mistake. It must allow a judicial inquiry and even if its report has not been made public and the social media are replete with permanent voters’ cards showing names and pictures of children; the evidence is already in public domain, and it has not reached government to set up a judicial panel of inquiry; how do you ensure that the coming election is transparent when all the processes leading to it are not transparent. The weight of the arguments and the fact that these matters are in public domain is enough for government to say justice must not only be done but seen to be done; let there be a judicial panel of inquiry on every infraction that has been complained about in the registration of voters. So, that we remove the iota of doubt in the mind of every Nigerian as to the election we are going into. Right now, Goggle has developed a technology by which you can count people without necessarily asking them to go to the PVC centre; to do an aerial counting meaning that the population of Nigeria can be done through aerial counting. Our National Population Commission has never been allowed to tell us the population of each ethnic origin; why? We’ve never been told how many Christians and Muslims exist in Nigeria because it’s not one of the things to be enumerated in a population headcount; why? But we knew that when the British were doing our headcount and the population headcount you have now, the figures are inconsistent with the figures of the British Government even on a projected bases using growth trends in world demographic statistics.
So, everyone laughs at us. Even children enrolments in schools do not reflect the demographic pattern given to certain areas of the country. Our population headcount is fake; it’s unverifiable and so will our voters’ registration be unless there is judicial inquiry into these processes that sanitise the system.”