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INEC’s Fraudulent Practice By Jide Ayobolu The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) recently submitted a supplementary budget of N19.7 billion to the House of Representatives in order to meet its financial obligations for the conduct of the 2007 general elections. Its submission of the supplementary budget to the House Committee on Finance arose from its delay in submitting to the budget office on time. The submission of the budget came just as the special adviser to the president on Budget Monitoring and Price Intelligence Unit, Professor Adekunle Wahab, criticized INEC for inflating its vehicles budget by N34 million. He reminded the legislators that its original budget of N70billion forwarded to the budget office for 2006 budget was slashed to N52billion. Wahab gave details of the cost of vehicles as put by INEC as follows: three Toyota Land cruiser jeeps N86 billion, four Land Rover cars N74million, four Mazda buses N451million, three Mercedes Benz trucks N53million and three speed boats N52million. According to Wahab, the budget office went to Toyota accredited agents and gave its findings to INEC, and said if they so wish, they should find out themselves, INEC’s contractor was not an accredited agent, hence the government would have lost a whooping N34billion in the process. Wahab further explained that, “most people accused us of removing the butter from their bread. When the butter is too much on the bread, it becomes difficult to know whether you want to eat bread or butter”. Similarly, the Chairman, House Committee on Finance, Alhaji Umar Abubakar, queried why N3billion was set aside for the purchase of ballot boxes in the supplementary budget, when the same amount was approved for the same item in the 2006 budget. Also, Shira who chairs the House Committee on Electoral Matters, sought to know what had happened to the N1billion found in the bank account of INEC’s late Director of Finance, alleged to be proceeds of corruption. But INEC was unable to answer all the queries. Disturbed by the huge public funds that would be wasted if funds were approved for INEC to buy all the vehicles requested for, Wahab suggested that it should use the vehicles government bought for the National Population Commission when it conducts national census early this year. The point therefore is, if INEC is this corrupt and cannot be trusted to do what is right with public funds, how can it be trusted to do what is right and proper with the forthcoming general elections in 2007? This is more so that the electoral body has failed very woefully in the discharge of its duties and responsibilities as it concerns the 1999 and 2003 elections. The bottom line is that we don’t have credible people in INEC to ensure a free and fair election. To compound the problems in the electoral body, the are no transparent processes, no formidable structures and mechanisms, no workable institutional frameworks in INEC. As the body is today, it exists at the behest of the president, who makes all the key and strategic appointments as well as approve its funding, all of these are abnormalities in a democratic setting. These issues are so very important because periodic elections are the center-piece of representative democracy. But since the time between now and the next election is so short that any fundamental restructuring cannot be carried out, it is very germane therefore that, all hands must be on deck to carefully monitor the activities of INEC by all stakeholders. Questions must be asked regularly, and INEC must be constantly kept on its toes, so as to live up to expectation in the conduct of a credible election that is acceptable to all and sundry, however, in the mean time, the appropriate authorities must ensure that all those that have in one way or the other misappropriated public funds must be duly brought to book, to send a warning signal to others who might have such dubious intent at heart.
Abuja |