Reps to hold public hearing on vote-buying

                                

                                    

The House of Representatives Committee on Electoral and Political Parties Matters has said it will conduct a public hearing to address the menace of vote-buying before the 2019 elections.

Chairman of the committee, Hajiya Aishatu Jibril Dukku, said this yesterday in Gombe when she led members of the committee on an oversight visit to the state INEC office.

Hajiya Dukku said the menace of vote-buying, if not tackled, would ruin Nigeria’s democracy; hence the National Assembly taking it as a challenge to halt the phenomenon before next year’s general elections.

Dukku added that the legislators would take input from members of the public to resolve the issue of vote-buying, which she said was posing threat to democracy.

She explained that the committee was in Gombe as part of its oversight function to check the level of preparedness and readiness of INEC to conduct free and fair elections in 2019.

She, therefore, called on the electoral body to come up with an arrangement that would give people living with disability easy access to cast their votes during the elections.

The state Resident Electoral Commissioner (REC), Alhaji Umar Ibrahim, said the commission was doing its best to ensure that the 2019 general elections were conducted in a threat-free environment.

Alhaji Ibrahim outlined lack of accessibility to deliver both sensitive and non-sensitive materials to the hard-to-reach areas in Dukku and Balanga local government areas as some of their major challenges.

Ibrahim said the commission needed about 13,000 ad hoc staff to handle facilitate successful elections in over 2,218 polling units and centres across the 11 local government areas of the state.