Vice President Yemi Osinbajo has said when effectively operated, a cashless policy in Nigeria can help stem the swell of lawless election backing by making it possible to track finances.
He bared this on Monday at the Presidential Villa when he entered a delegation of the European Union Election Observation Mission led by Mr. Barry Andrews, the Chief Observer, who’s also a member of the European Parliament.
He said, “I suppose that what we should be looking at is to give further structure. The cashless thing has been really profitable and helps with shadowing. That kind of structure is useful for further fiscal addition and the more fiscal addition you have, the easier it’s to track. ”
He added that “so important plutocrat can be spent without it being tracked, ” under the current election backing practices in the country.
According to a statement by his media assistant, Laolu Akande, while noting the serious difficulty in controlling election backing because of cash deals, the VP stated that there were still infrastructure issues needed to be in place to insure an effective cashless system in the country.
“With cash deals, it’s still delicate to seriously control election backing, ”the VP observed.
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On the issue of electoral offences, the VP noted that there’s the Electoral Offences Commission Bill at the National Assembly and “ we hope that it’ll begin a new governance of dealing with electoral offences which would be helpful. ”
He emphasised that “ by and large, one should n’t anticipate INEC to be the investigator of electoral offences. I suppose that law enforcement agencies should be responsible for arresting and executing malefactors, State by State.
“Electoral offences are always seen through a political prism; people will always feel that they’re being fulfilled because they belong to a certain party.
“What’s more important is that we’ve to find a system where the police could have a special unit for offences during the course of choices. The Federal High Courts could also have a special governance to deal with offences and not extend beyond the Federal High Courts.”
On the part of the judicial system, the Vice President noted that further attention should be paid to the monitoring of bars and their issues, calling for further scrutiny from the National Judicial Council( NJC).
He bared that conversations have been had in the history concerning misbehavior on the part of some judges and those set up shamefaced should be brought to the fore.
“There should be warrants and that way, we would be suitable to clean up and correct some of the problems, ”Prof. Osinbajo noted.
In his own reflections, Mr Andrews mentioned that the Observer Mission would be covering the choices coming up coming month and stopgap for a peaceful and fair electoral process.
According to him, this is the 7th time the Independent National Electoral Commission is inviting the EU Mission to cover the choices, adding that the platoon has been in the country since 11th January and would be then till the end of March, 2023.
Other members of the delegation included Ms Samuela Isopi, Ambassador, EU Delegation to Nigeria and ECOWAS, and Mr. Thomas Boserup, Deputy Chief Observer, EU Election Observation Mission.
