From Obinna Odogwu, Awka
A civil society organization, Centre for Transparency Advocacy (CTA), on Friday, alleged that some political parties were responsible for some of the false information flying around on social media concerning the Anambra State governorship election.
Executive Director of the organization, Faith Nwadishi, at a press briefing in Awka, the state capital, said that politicians were the ones heating up the polity with false information in order to shore up their political fortunes.
“There has been a lot of misinformation in the run up to this election. Many of the misinformation are from political parties seeking to improve their fortunes. However, we call on the people to be wary and screen the information they receive about the security situation in the state and the activities of INEC.
“There is no bloodshed in Anambra State as the security personnel deployed have so far taken effective charge and provided adequate security. No soldiers were seen escorting fake voters into Anambra State as that is fake news.
“There are no indiscriminate arrests of political party leaders as being spread and INEC has not written any results for any political party and has also not endorsed any candidate as being spread. Only the people of Anambra will decide their next Governor and that power is effectively in their hands”, she said.
The ED said that although the security situation in the state before now had created a state of uncertainty and cast doubts as to the possibility of conducting election in such a tense atmosphere, the state is currently peaceful.
“The CTA commends the election management body for adopting one of our recommendations in previous elections which is the appropriate identification of party agents.
“For this election, INEC has issued tags with photographs of the agents for easy identification. Nobody can claim to be an agent of any political party and by that means cause trouble at any polling unit or collation centre when they are not.
“Furthermore, the introduction of colour codes for the Local Government Areas is another amazing innovation of the commission, which means that each LGA will have a distinct colour of ballot papers.
“So far, we can verify that INEC has deployed all required sensitive and non-sensitive materials to their locations. The sensitive materials had arrived at the LGAs headquarters yesterday from the Central Bank and are being moved today to the RACs from where they will move tomorrow to the Polling Units.
“We shall be expecting polling to open by 8am on the average in most polling centres in the state and the ad hoc staff to be very professional in the handling of the new device, Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS)”, she said.