Andy Esiet, Calabar
With the introduction of BIVAS, the Police, Army and INEC will be less relevant in future elections in Nigeria.
Giving a postmortem yesterday on the February 25 presidential and national assembly elections, the former Senator who represented Cross River Central in the Senate, Senator John Owan-Enoh said, “with a free and fair electoral process getting our elections right, the Police, Army and even the IlNEC may soon become less relevant in conducting elections.
“As we’re getting our elections right, I think institutions of state are going to be less important even INEC as a body. As electoral system becomes more transparent and become more dependent on the people, that’s how the institutions of state will be less important than they have been used before to get advantage”.
He said, going by the outcome of the Saturday elections, ” I think we going back to the kind of election that was conducted when MKO Abiola ran the presidential race. There are lots of people and I am part of them that think that if that election was allowed to get concluded, it would have become a basis upon which we would have gotten better at the end of elections.
“With the manner of this election, for me President Muhammadu Buhari is bequeathing one of the best legacies in terms of our democracy. We went through an election that was devoid of the usual tension, the usual violence, the usual snatching of ballot boxes because of what INEC put in place which is the BVAS, it was the test of people real strength and popularity and I think that the implications of what has happened is that the conduct of parties in terms of selection of candidates, various party leadership are going to be more mindful of the implications of that and allow people who are loved by their people to emerge”.
However Owan-Enoh who was a governorship aspirant in the last All Progressives Congress (APC) primaries in the state, said, ” there may be few hitches here and there but I commend INEC although we need to wait a little bit longer to see what views across the country before giving a grade but in terms of the outcome so far, politicians are a class of people that don’t accept defeat easily but I think that BVAS is causing a bit of change in people’s attitude.
“We are not saying that we were not going to have bad losers but it just appear that people who lose now have more confidence in the outcome than before where people were hijacking ballot papers, boxes and INEC results”
