Romanus Ugwu, Abuja
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has pledged to uphold the Supreme Court ruling in Rivers State to exclude from the ballot candidates of the All Progressives Congress (APC) .
The Supreme Court in Abuja upheld the order of a Federal High Court, Port Harcourt, nullifying the APC primaries in Rivers State, upholding that the primaries were held in disobedience to a court judgment barring the party from conducting congresses pending the determination of a suit filed by 22 aggrieved members of the party.
The apex court in its judgment set aside the ruling of the Court of Appeal, Port Harcourt, which in October 2018 upturned the interlocutory order of the high court.
In a unanimous verdict by a five-man panel of Justices, the Supreme Court said the judgment sought to be upturned was entered by consent and could not be appealed as a matter of right.
Speaking during the daily briefing to update Nigerians and the international community on the processes made for this weekend’s poll, the commission’s chairman, Mahmood Yakubu, insisted that since the highest court in the land has ruled on it, the commission has no other option than to obey the order.
“Once a Supreme Court makes a pronouncement all essence of authority in the paper are bound to obey the judgment of the Supreme Court. The commission as a law abiding institution is bound by the judgment. That is my answer to the question and there is nowhere else to go. We will go by the judgments of all the courts but once it gets to the apex court, that is the end to the litigation,” he said.
On the readiness of the commission to safeguard the voting materials from being tampered with, the INEC boss assured that the commission has mechanism in place to fully protect its facilities from any unauthorised access as most of them are offline.
“You can only attack something that is online. So much of it is actually offline. But, I have taken note of what you have said and we will continue to strengthen security around the ICT. But, at the moment we have no reason for any panic about any possibility of attack on the facility or compromise on our ICT facilities,” he assured.
He also noted that the commission is not under any pressure from any quarter to conduct the election, promising to announce the result of the election as soon as possible in line with the procedure used in announcing the 2015 presidential election.
“I said so before but let me also repeat that now that we have more presidential candidates than 2015. We have more registered voters than we had in 2015. The size of the result sheet is bigger than we had in 2015. But, we are committed to concluding the process for the presidential roughly around the same time that we concluded the last general election.”
Earlier reading a prepared speech, he said: “At Tuesday’s briefing, we reported that we achieved 95 per cent configuration of the Smart Card Readers (SCR) nationwide…I am pleased to report that we have now achieved 100 per cent completion of the configuration. We are good to go on this score.
He said having moved the sensitive materials to the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), the forward deployment to the 774 LGAs nationwide, which commenced yesterday February would be completed today.