Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA) has called on the National Assembly to mandate the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to emulate the conduct of the just conducted South African election.
The organisation stressed the need for INEC to understudy the proceedings of the South African elections with a view to learning democratic values in that peaceful, transparent, and credible poll. South Africa, on May 29, conducted elections to elect a new National Assembly and the provincial legislature in each of the nine provinces.
HURIWA, in a statement by its National Coordinator, Emmanuel Onwubiko, commended the electoral umpire in South Africa for demonstrating transparency and accountability, saying such disposition made the just ended election free of frictions.
The rights group called for a constitutional amendments to remove the appointing of INEC commissioners and chairman as a sole duty of the President, but to provide adequate tenure protection for the INEC officials to safeguard free and fair elections.
HURIWA recalled that this last election in South Africa was the seventh general election held under the conditions of universal adult suffrage since the end of the apartheid era in 1994.
The group stated that although South Africa was known for a lot of violence and high crime rates, election was conducted in a relatively peaceful atmosphere devoid of interruptions by armed thugs.
HURIWA encouraged the political parties in Nigeria, especially the All Progressives Congress, Peoples Democratic Party, to copy the positive signs of the collective decision of South African political elite to desist from enlisting the services of armed hirelings and street urchins to unleash bloody violence to disrupt electoral process.
“HURIWA is also appealing to the Nigerian electorate to note that in South Africa, the voters were never caught on camera collecting small bags of rice or being paid N5,000 per vote but for the fact that although millions of South African black voters are very poor and economically disabled, but they refused to be bribed or compromised to mortgage their electoral future to money bags but opted to exercise their constitutional freedom to choose their leaders, is a formidable force of positivity that other voters in the rest of Africa and especially in Nigeria should embrace so Democracy can be sustained in Africa”, it said.
