Okwe Obi, Abuja
A civil rights organisation, Women Advocates Research and Documentation Centre (WARDC), has traced the high rate of voter’s inducement, thuggery and ballot-box snatching that characterised the 2019 polls to political parties that fielded incompetent and desperate candidates.
WARDC Executive Director Dr Abiola Akiyode-Afolabi stated this in Abujz at the debriefing on Gender Observation Report on Vote Buying and Inducement in the 2019 General Elections.
“Political parties in this country have shown that they are incapable of providing candidates that are worthy of being elected and can be elected by people, based on their credibility, and that, as political parties, they cannot get to power on the merit except when they lure and induce people as a way to buy their candidates into power and, by extension, reduce the rating of Nigeria in the eye of the world,” Akiyide-Afolabi said.
She decried the “rampant spread of vote buying is acting as a stimulus for the ruin and death of democracy in the country, and also acting as a hindrance to the possibilities of good governance.”
The university don pointed out that “democracy should naturally come with some freedom, for people to choose without any form of discrimination.”