Bishop Isaac Idahosa, the 2023 Vice Presidential Candidate of the New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP), has called for proper punishment to be imposed on the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and public officials for electoral failures.
A close associate of former Kano governor and 2023 NNPP presidential candidate Rabiu Kwankwaso, Idahosa argued that without consequences for actions and inactions that fall below acceptable standards, such misconduct will continue.
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“We don’t punish anybody for what he does; there are no consequences, so he keeps on repeating it,” the cleric said on Channels Television’s The Morning Brief programme on Wednesday.
“INEC does this, and nobody puts them to check, and then it repeats it. Once there are no consequences for your actions or inactions, then a repeat will occur because there is no accountability.”
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) introduced the Result Viewing Portal (IReV) and the Bimodal Voter Registration System (BVAS) for the 2023 general elections, but many politicians criticized the effectiveness of the technologies, with INEC attributing the issues to technical glitches.
In the recent election, Kwankwaso and his running mate Idahosa secured fourth place with 1,496,687 votes, while Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress (APC) received 8,794,726 votes, Atiku Abubakar of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) garnered 6,984,520 votes, and Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) scored 6,101,533 votes.
The election results were contested up to the Supreme Court, but the court ruled that the unavailability of results on IReV did not provide sufficient grounds to nullify the election.
Idahosa also expressed concerns over the growing power of certain individuals in government, overshadowing institutions, and undermining governance.
He criticized the increasing influence of money in politics and called for elections to be standardized and held on the same day to ensure transparency.
The NNPP chieftain said all elections should be regularised and conducted on the same day for transparency.
He said, “I will want to suggest where all elections are done on the same day. That will help curb a whole lot of things – presidential, senatorial, gubernatorial, all on the same day. It will cut costs and will get the desirable results. But when you have this in a span of one or two weeks after the presidential, a whole lot can go, bandwagon can go.”
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