The Labour Party (LP) has demanded the immediate sack of Professor Mahmood Yakubu as the chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).
The party also called for the sack of the INEC Federal
Commissioner in charge of voter education. Festus Okoye.
A statement released on Thursday by the Labour Party
Obi-Datti Presidential Campaign Organisation accused the two individuals of
leading the commission in the desecration of the 2023 presidential election in
Nigeria.
It added that INEC wasted the funds given to it by the
government as well as international bodies for the execution of the 2023
general elections in the country.
Furthermore, the Labour Party campaign organization
said INEC spent
billions of tax payer’s money on the pretext of deploying the BVAS and other
technological innovations for the 2023 polls but ended up manually manipulating
the results to force their own preferred presidential candidate on Nigerians.
It, therefore, called for the immediate sack and prosecution
of Yakubu and Okoye for the ‘crimes’ committed.
The excerpt of the statement as shared by Kenneth
Okonkwo on his Twitter account reads: “The Labour Party Obi-Datti
Presidential Campaign Organisation has demanded unequivocally, the immediate
dismissal from office and prosecution of Prof Yakubu Mahmood, INEC Chairman,
and Festus Okoye, INEC Federal Commissioner in charge of voter education
following the final reports of the Nigerian Civil Society Situation Room and
the International Community regarding the desecration of the presidential
election of 25th February, 2023.
“They consequently called for a forensic financial
investigation of the billions of naira disbursed and donated to INEC by the
government and the international community, who are called upon to sanction these
erring officers for wasting their funds and criminally compromising the
presidential election to announce their preferred candidate.
They came to this conclusion because INEC spent billions
of tax payers money on the pretext of deploying the BVAS and other technological
innovations needed for electronic storage and transmission of election results,
but intentionally bypassed these noble inventions during the election in order
to manipulate the election and is dubiously turning around to attempt to
suggest that manual collation of results may suffice, which will render all our
technological improvements in our elections useless.
They asserted that if Adamawa REC can be prosecuted, Mahmood
and Okoye should face worse fate because they committed greater crimes.”
