Says With Emefiele, CBN No Longer Safe for Sensitive Election Materials
By Roundoffnews
A Human Rights Lawyer, Mr. Femi Falana(SAN), has insisted that President Muhammadu Buhari should sack the CBN Governor, Dr. Godwin Emefiele over his involvement in partisan politics.
According to Falana, senstive election materials can’t be stashed in the Central Bank of Nigeria(CBN) with Dr. Godwin Emefiele still presiding as the bank’s governor.
Falana spoke in Ado Ekiti, on Thursday, at a Southwest Youth and Women Conference organised by New Generation Girls and Women Development Initiative (NIGAWD) and Balm in Gilead Foundation for Sustainable Development (BIGIF).
The event, sponsored by the United States Agency for International Development, National Democratic Institute and United Kingdom Agency for International Development, was intended to promote ‘Vote not Fight initiative’, in Ekiti and Osun governorship polls.
Ruing the increasing penchant and propensity for election manipulations and bloodshed in the country, Falana craved the establishment electoral offences Tribunal, to try offenders to sanitise the system .
Falana regretted that despite that over 2,000 electoral offenders had been arrested by the police since 2011 general elections, that many were neither zealously prosecuted nor punished.
“INEC is trying, it has deployed technology to get rid of rigging, but we can no longer keep sensitive election materials in the vault of the CBN, because the governor of the CBN is a card carrying member of the All Progressives Congress.
“It has never happened anywhere in the world , this is very dangerous. The CBN Governor’s power is enormous under the CBN Act, so he can’t be a politician.
“We can’t look for alternative place to keep our electoral materials , it is the CBN Governor that must be removed and whether President Buhari likes it or not, Emefiele must go. They had filed a motion against him and we will pursue it to a logical conclusion”, he stated.
Harping on the need for the coming Ekiti election to be conducted transparently, the Lawyer posited that; “People commit electoral crime due to the fact that they were being aided by politicians.
“Statistics showed that 750 electoral offenders were arrested in 2011, 900 in 2015, and 1,120 in 2019. But majority of them were not prosecuted. The police even filed nil prosecui motions to terminate some of their cases”.
Expressing worries over the trajectory of youths’ involvement in thuggery, Falana, said: “Don’t allow politicians to induce you with money. When I was contesting in 2003, I told politicians that if you want the children of the poor to be thugs, let your children lead them.
“What I have seen and felt in Nigeria was that, the politicians give thugs money, drugged and armed them. And after the election, they will not be able to fund them and they become criminals.
“There was a bye election in Omuo Ekiti to fill a vacancy in the House of Assembly, three people were killed and two policemen injured. Right now, people are being attacked in Ekiti and same in Osun. But all we demand is credible, free and fair election”.
Falana added that the electoral system would ever remain stunted as long as youths and women are perpetually neglected and muzzled.
The BIGIF and NIGAWD Executive Directors, Oluwatumininu Adedeji and Abimbola Aladejare-Salako respectively, urged INEC and other stakeholders to work hard to prevent rigging, bloodshed and violence in the Ekiti and Osun elections.
They also reiterated that youth and women should be inclusive in the policy making organs by all political parties to give them recognition .
